The radiation levels emitted by cellphone
towers on top of Poolesville’s water tower is
well within acceptable levels, according to a
town-commissioned study, but one resident
isn’t satisﬁed with the results.
The study by Radiofrequency Safety International Inc. of Kiowa, Kan., found that the
amount of radio-frequency energy put out by
the cell towers was well below the limits to
which humans can be safely exposed.
The Poolesville water tower holds antennas for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint/
Nextel, which bring the town $167,000 a year
in revenue from renting the space.
According to the report, which the town
commissioners requested in May, the highest
reading recorded during the June 28 inspection
was 0.2 percent of the level permitted by the
Federal Communications Commission.
The study cost the town $2,988, Town
Manager Wade Yost wrote in an email Tuesday.
The town is happy the emissions fall within
the FCC standards, he said.
Poolesville resident Thomas Orr, who lives

See RADIATION, Page A-9
In the search for a college athletic scholarship, parents have endless
opportunities to spend money, including youth teams, camps run by college
coaches, buying top equipment, and online recruiting sites that market athletes.
The trend has led to children specializing in sports at earlier ages, which has led
to more serious injuries, youth giving up free time to chase their athletic dreams,
and in some cases burnout. Another trend is that many top athletes now are being
forced to choose between their club and high school teams.

Elite athletes
sacriﬁce to play
prep sports
Most college recruiting
now takes place outside of
high school competition
n

BY JENNIFER BEEKMAN
STAFF WRITER

Thomas S. Wootton High
School tennis star Titas Bera went
undefeated this spring, winning his
third consecutive county singles
championship and the state boys
doubles title.
Bera, a rising senior, hasn’t lost
a singles match in three years of

See ELITE, Page A-10

$5B

Nationwide
spending on youth
sports each year.

$2B

Amount of athletic scholarships
awarded by Division I and II
schools each year.

Only 2 percent of youth
athletes earn scholarships that
average about $11,000
n

BY

C

Early start can lead to burn out

Children nationwide (18
to 5) who participate in
youth sports each year.

3.5M

Children nationwide under 14
who receive medical treatment
for a sports injury in a year.

A-10

Online services change recruiting A-11

STAFF WRITER

30M

Doctors see more injuries

A-11

Game in Town.” In it, he estimated that parents spend $5 billion a year on youth sports.
He says that’s a low guess; it doesn’t include
gas and other expenses parents pay just getting their children to practice.
Thurman’s daughter, Taylor, could run
up a bill of $5,000 to $7,000 a year just on ﬁeld
hockey. Just one event on her Futures team
cost about $2,800.
Add in swimming and track, and that’s another $3,000 to $4,000. That’s just one child,
who competes at Oberlin College in Ohio, but
is not on scholarship.
“Few athletes get full rides,” Thurman
said.

See SCHOLARSHIPS, Page A-11

145K

Students who receive
either partial or full
athletic scholarships.

70%

Children who drop out of youth
sports by age 13. Reasons cited
are adults, coaches and parents.

SOURCES: MARK HYMAN, BALTIMORE-BASED AUTHOR OF ‘THE MOST EXPENSIVE GAME IN TOWN’; NCAA; CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION; SAFE KIDS (CHILDREN’S NATIONAL MEDICAL CENTER)

NEWS

DOWN ON
THE FARM
Montgomery County
continues tour tradition as
farms welcome visitors,
show off their products and
offer special entertainment.

A-4

SPORTS

STEPPING
HIS WAY
TO THE TOP
Bethesda man rises to
among the best in the
world at competitive
stair climbing.

B-1

Group to meet in September to
consider candidates for open seat
n

TRAVIS MEWHIRTER

andy Thurman had a rough
idea how much she was
spending on her daughters’
athletic pursuits — between
$11,000 to $14,000. She knew
that a ﬁeld hockey stick went
for $150 to $400 and that letting her children play on the Futures team —
ﬁeld hockey’s version of the Amateur Athletic
Union — would cost nearly $3,000.
While it was happening, though, “I didn’t
realize I was spending all that money on it,”
said Thurman, the Montgomery Blair High
School ﬁeld hockey coach.
She chuckles now, thinking about the expenses of youth sports — the lucrative industry it has become.
Baltimore author Mark Hyman wrote a
book on the topic, titled “The Most Expensive

Process starts to
name successor
to Sen. Garagiola

Automotive

BY

RYAN MARSHALL
STAFF WRITER

State Sen. Rob Garagiola (D-Dist. 15) of
Germantown won’t ofﬁcially leave his Senate
seat until Sept. 1, but the process of naming his
replacement is beginning to heat up.
The Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee will meet on Sept. 10 to name a
successor to Garagiola, and committee members already have begun interviewing potential
candidates, Chairman Gabe Albornoz said.
Albornoz said that while there are several
unofﬁcial candidates, only Del. Brian Feldman
(D-Dist. 15) of Potomac has ofﬁcially acknowledged interest in the post.
Once the seat ofﬁcially becomes vacant,
the central committee will have 30 days to
make a recommendation to the governor on
who should ﬁll the spot.
Candidates have until Sept. 9 to submit a
resume and letter of intent to be appointed for
the Senate seat.
Feldman has emerged as the front-runner,
but his endorsement by the chairman and vice
chairman of the District 15 Democratic Caucus in a June letter to the central committee
has drawn some complaints that the seat was
being handed to him without consideration of
minority candidates.

See REPLACEMENT, Page A-9

B-13

Calendar

A-2

Classiﬁed

B-9

Community News

A-4

Entertainment

A-13

Opinion

A-12

Sports

B-1
Please

RECYCLE

Check out our Services Directory
ADVERTISING INSIDE B SECTION

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THE GAZETTE

Page A-2

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

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EVENTS
EVENTS

GALLERY

Send items at least two weeks in advance of the paper in which you would like them to appear.
Go to calendar.gazette.net and click on the submit button. Questions? Call 301-670-2078.

CORRECTIONS
A July 17 story about a discussion
of solar panels in Poolesville incorrectly quoted two comments by resident George Motto. Motto suggested
that the town buy, not build, a microturbine. Motto also suggested that the
town clear trees to make room for solar
panels. It was Town Manager Wade
Yost who said that about two acres of
trees would have to be removed.

SPORTS Check online for
American Legion baseball
playoff coverage.

A&E Get a free taste of
Afro-Cuban music on Friday
in Gaithersburg.

For more on your community, visit www.gazette.net

A photo caption that ran in the July
17 edition of The Gazette about the
Washington International Horse Show
incorrectly identiďŹ ed the horse with
Madeline Poss. It is Jest A Diva.

Cello, guitar and electronics duo Janel and Anthony will perform in concert from 6 to 7:30 p.m.
Friday at the United Therapeutics BioWall Plaza in Silver Spring. For more information, visit www
.janelandanthony.com or www.cuneiformrecords.com.

Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Business Center, 95 Monroe St.,
Rockville. Learn how to use QuickBooks to pay
bills and track the ďŹ nancial performance of a
small business. $75. 301-315-8096.
Storytime on the Lake: Beavers, 10:30-11:30
a.m., Black Hill Visitor Center, 20926 Lake Ridge
Drive, Boyds. Come aboard the pontoon boat
to hear a story and scout out the wonders of
Little Seneca Lake. Ages 3-6. $5. Register at
www.parkpass.org.

BestBets

27

Sun Prints, 10-11 a.m., Black
Hill Visitor Center, 20926
Lake Ridge Drive, Boyds.
Make works of art from materials found during a short
hike. $10. Register at www.
parkpass.org.

Buddhist master to lead ceremonies at Poolesville temple
The Tibetan Buddhist master His
Holiness Karma Kuchen Rinpoche will
be in Poolesville on Aug. 4 to perform
an “empowerment” ceremony at the
Kunzang Palyul Chöling Buddhist
Temple.

PEOPLE & PL ACES
RYAN MARSHALL

The Amitabha and Amitayus, the
two empowerments being offered, are
both related to health and longevity.
They will begin at 10 a.m., said Claire
Waggoner, who’s helping organize the
event.
A lunch will be held at 2 p.m.
Rinpoche is the 12th throne holder
of the Palyul lineage of the Buddhist
Nyingma tradition, and oversees thousands of monks and nuns in temples
and monasteries in India, Tibet and
other areas.
Born in 1970 in southern India,
he was enthroned in 2000 at the main
Palyul monastery in Tibet.
Rinpoche will be leading a retreat
in New York, and will come down to
Maryland for the event, Waggoner
said.
Everyone is welcome to attend, she
said.
Palyul is one of the six major divisions of Nyingma, one of the four
branches of Buddhism, according to
information provided by Waggoner.
The Amitabha empowerment represents the Buddha of limitless light,
and is often prayed to when someone
dies, to bring a good rebirth.
Amitayus is the Buddha of longevity, to whom prayers are believed to
bring about a long life.
The suggested donation to attend
the event is $40, but $25 for seniors
and full-time students.
It will be held in a tent on the lawn
of the temple at 18400 River Road.
For more information and to register, go to www.tara.org, call 301-7106259 or email kpc@tara.org.

Cybersecurity camp
is for middle-schoolers
Montgomery College’s Germantown
campus will offer a one-week summer
camp, Monday through Aug. 2, for
middle school students interested in
the growing ﬁeld of cybersecurity.
The session provides hands-on activities focused on science, technology,
engineering, math and cybersecurity.
Students will be taught basic concepts
of programming, forensics, cryptography and program management
from a series of gaming, modeling and
simulation activities that explore the
interconnections of science, math,
technology and computers, according
to the school.
Camp will be held from 9 a.m. to 3
p.m. The campus is at 20200 Observation Drive. The cost is $250 for county
residents. Registration at montgomerycollege.edu/youth.

Ex-Redskins to play
in softball fundraiser
The inaugural Redskins Alumni
Association softball tournament will
be held Sept. 7 at Morris Park in Gaithersburg.
The coed double-elimination tournament will start at 8 a.m. and continue on two ﬁelds during the day, with
the championship game set for 8 p.m.
The park is at 421 Summit Hall Road.
All players will receive a T-shirt. A
DJ, food vendors and silent auctions
will be featured, while attendees will
have the opportunity to meet former
Redskins players.
Money raised at the event will be donated to Literacy for a Lifetime. Usborne
Publishing will match 50 percent of the
total earned at the tournament to donate
books to underprivileged children in the
Washington, D.C., area.
Team registration forms for T-shirt
orders are due Aug. 18.
For more information, visit suzyblacks.com/softball-tournament-2013
or contact event manager Lindsay King
at info@suzyblacks.com.

County teams up with Univision
Montgomery County is teaming
up with Noticias Washington, the
area’s Univision television station. The
county will have a weekly news segment called “Montgomery al Día,” or
“Montgomery Today.”
The segment will highlight programs, services and events related to
the county’s departments.
Lorna Virgilí, a Spanish language
broadcast journalist and public information ofﬁcer with the county, will
lead the segment. It will be shown
during Friday newscasts of Noticias
Washington.

food bank, will hold its July Help the
Hungry food drive from 11 a.m. to 5
p.m. Saturday and Sunday at all 27
Giant Food stores in Montgomery
County.
Volunteers will be in front of the
supermarkets to accept donations of
nonperishable foods.
Items on the Manna Healthy Food
Wish List include canned tuna and
salmon packed in water, canned or
dried beans, brown rice and oatmeal.
The complete list will be available at
the stores.
“The current need for donations
of canned products is critical during
these summer months,” Jenna Umbriac, director of nutrition programs
for Manna, wrote in an email. “While
we are able to provide our clients with
an abundance of fresh produce this
season, we are very low on staple nonperishable items.”

TV show looks for
Montgomery participants
Producers of the DIY Network
show “I Want That” are looking for

homeowners in Montgomery County
to be on the program.
The show features homeowners
demonstrating smart appliances, gadgets, tools and other products in their
homes. Participants will get to keep the
products they demonstrate.
The show’s casting team is looking for “enthusiastic, clear-spoken
homeowners,” particularly those with
ﬂexible schedules during the week,
according to a news release from the
show.
Homes within a 30-minute drive of
downtown Washington will be particularly considered.
Some basic knowledge of home
improvement is required, although
the show is not a renovation or homemakeover program.
Applications for the show can be
found at diynetwork.com/about-us/
new-diy-series-casting-in-washingtondc/index.html.

Cool science

Save 10 Mile Creek
rally in Silver Spring
The Save 10 Mile Creek Coalition
hold a rally from 9 to 10 a.m. Thursday in Royce Hanson Park next to the
Montgomery County Planning Board
ofﬁces at the intersection of Georgia
Avenue and Spring Street in downtown
Silver Spring.
That’s the day that planning department staff will present their draft
and request a public hearing date for
their plan on 10 Mile Creek. The coalition says none of the plans under
consideration adequately protect the
Clarksburg creek. For more information, visit savetenmilecreek.com.

New system for reporting
animal emergencies
Individuals in Montgomery County
should now call the Police Emergency
Communications Center at 911 or
Montgomery County 311 to report animal emergencies and complaints.
According to county ofﬁcials,
individuals should call 911 to report
animal-related emergencies such as
animal attacks in progress; an animal
locked in a hot car; animal cruelty in
progress; or an animal creating a trafﬁc
hazard.
They may call the police nonemergency number, 301-279-8000, to
report animal-related complaints such
as a sick or injured animal or one that
appears abandoned; an animal neglect
situation; an animal in a trap issued by
Montgomery County; an animal in distress due to severe weather conditions,
such as those without shelter or water;
an animal threatening the well-being
of a community member, but not in
progress; an animal bite or attack,
again, not in progress; or an animal
nuisance such as a barking dog or
caretakers not cleaning up after a pet.
The MC311 Information Center
will handle reports of dead deer along
roadways. Call 311 or 240-777-0311
from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through
Friday. Other times, use the center’s
website, www.MC311.com.
People can continue to call 240773-5960 to reach the Montgomery

TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE

Will Loftus, 5, of Poolesville and other children watch as Maryland Science Center
staff give demonstrations of the various states of matter Thursday at the Poolesville
Library. Here, boiling water and liquid nitrogen are combined to create condensation.
County Animal Shelter to inquire
about pet adoptions, the low-cost spay
and neuter program or pet licensing,
or to report a lost pet or other animal
shelter matters.
They also can continue to call 240773-5925 to reach the police Animal
Services Division to speak with an
animal services ofﬁcer, to follow up on
a previously reported animal-related
complaint, to inquire about the Animal
Matters Hearing Board or to inquire
about rabies vaccination clinics.

Group seeks women
for candidate training
Emerge Maryland, a group dedicated to helping Democratic women
run for public ofﬁce, will begin accepting applications for its course beginning in October and running through
April.
“Basically, we train women to be
candidates,” said Diane Fink, the organization’s executive director.
The online application process,
open through Sept. 7, can be found
on the group’s website at emergemaryland.org. Twenty women will be
accepted.
The training will provide more
than 70 hours of training in areas such
as fundraising, campaign management, networking and other skills
needed to run a political campaign.

The nonproﬁt also operates in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky,
Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey,
New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Virginia
and Wisconsin.

DEATHS
Maxwell Croft Howard
Maxwell Croft Howard, 91,
formerly of Rockville, died July
17, 2013, at the Charlestown retirement community in Catonsville. A service will take place at
10 a.m. July 27 at Pumphrey’s
Funeral Home in Rockville, followed by interment at Parklawn
Memorial Park.

Charles Gordon Hollister
Charles “Chuck” Gordon
Hollister, 82, formerly of Gaithersburg and recently of Schuyler,
Neb., died July 18, 2013, in David
City, Neb. Funeral services took
place at 11 a.m. July 22 at the
Svoboda Funeral Home South
Chapel in Wahoo, Neb., followed
by burial at the Cedar Grove Extension Cemetery in New Bern,
N.C.

The bridges had to be strong and stable
— and made of spaghetti.
Charged with this unusual engineering
task, a group of about 40 high school students worked intently Thursday with the
uncooked yellow strands to build a roughly
half-meter structure they had designed to
support more weight than their competitors’.
The project was one of many opportunities the students, mostly from the Washington, D.C., area, had over the past several
weeks to immerse themselves in engineering during Johns Hopkins University’s Engineering Innovation summer program at its
Rockville campus.
By the time July 26 marks the end of the
four-week class — based on an introductory
engineering course for Johns Hopkins freshman — the students will have covered a variety of engineering ﬁelds from electrical to
mechanical to chemical in both lectures and
hands-on activities.
“What the kids enjoy are the hands-on
projects and applying what they’re hearing
in their lectures to practical problems,” said
Karen Borgsmiller, the program’s director.
The young engineering students in
Rockville are among about 320 students who
took part in the program around the country
this summer.
To be eligible for the program, the high
school students were required to have taken
Algebra 2 and trigonometry as well as a class
in either chemistry, biology or physics.
Borgsmiller said one goal of the course is
to help students learn more about engineering before choosing it as a major.
“It’s an opportunity for them to learn
a little bit more about the ﬁeld before they
check that box,” Borgsmiller said.
For those already sure they want to pursue
engineering, she said, the program can help
them examine the different areas of the ﬁeld.

TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE

Kevin Li, 16, of Clarksville (left) and Jackie Aybar,
16, of Rockville work together July 18 to glue
pasta into rods for a spaghetti bridge project at
the Johns Hopkins University Engineering Innovation summer program in Rockville.

The program — which also includes a
research paper and several lab reports —
pushes the students to solve difﬁcult problems rather than memorize information,
Borgsmiller said.
Alana Wertheimer — a 17-year-old rising senior at Georgetown Day School — said
the program has served as an introduction
to different areas of engineering and helped
conﬁrm her interest.
“This course so far has helped me decide
that I really do want to major in engineering,” said Wertheimer of Potomac.
Wertheimer said she and her fellow students analyzed spaghetti’s material prop-

erties, including how far it could bend and
stretch.
“It’s just the same as testing iron or some
other metal — what are the limits that it can
stretch to and move in a bridge,” she said.
In another project, the students developed a circuit board that could be used to
communicate with a robot and cause it to
move toward a light placed in front of one
of three sensors.
Ben Sannicolas, a student at Richard
Montgomery High School in Rockville, said
he enjoyed learning about electrical engineering, a subject area he said was new territory for him.
“When I go to college, I’m trying to decide whether I want to do something like
computer science, whether I want to do
some kind of engineering, whether I want to
do something maybe in ﬁnance,” Sannicolas
said. “I thought if I took this it would give me
a better idea of engineering.”
Fred Katiraie — a long-time program instructor and a math professor at Montgomery College — said he thinks it’s important
for students to get involved and interested in
engineering early to help them take courses
such as math and physics more seriously.
The goal of Johns Hopkins’ program, he
said, is to expose the high school students to
a ﬁeld he thinks needs more members.
“I sincerely hope to spark an interest and
have them exposed to different branches,”
he said.
About 80 percent of students who participated in the program went on to major
in math, science or engineering in college,
Borgsmiller said, adding the majority of
those students choose engineering.
Katiraie said he had seen the students
grow friendships as well as their engineering knowledge.
Wertheimer said she enjoyed making
friends with people from different schools
and backgrounds united by at least one
shared interest.
“We all have the common denominator
of engineering,” she said.
lpowers@gazette.net

In the months before he
went on a spree of armed robberies in January 2012 in Montgomery County, Ramon Gunn
seemed to have it all.
A recent graduate from
Barry University, Gunn, now
27, had landed a job at MedImmune in Gaithersburg earning
$70,000 a year. An Eagle Scout,
he also had earned a master’s
in accounting, bought a new
Mercedes and moved into an
upscale apartment building in
North Bethesda. His girlfriend,
who aspired to become a doctor in the Navy, had moved from
Michigan to Bethesda to study
medicine at the Uniformed Service University of Medicine.
Then, Gunn bought a replica
handgun and cased restaurants
and salons, returning days later
to rob them.
The crimes confused family
members and law ofﬁcials.
“By your actions, you’ve
thrown your life away, and I’m
not really sure why,” Judge Marielsa A. Bernard of the Montgomery County Circuit Court told
Gunn on Thursday, ordering
him to serve 16 years in prison
and suspending the additional
95 years of the 111-year sentence she imposed.
Gunn has been indicted on
similar charges in Delaware, ofﬁcials said.

Police caught Gunn robbing
the Night Dreams store in Rockville on Feb. 20, 2012. It was one
of a half-dozen crimes he told
police he had committed, according to court records, which
show that the spree began with a
robbery at a Subway restaurant
in Germantown.
Gunn also robbed employees of hair salons and fast-food
restaurants
in Rockville
and Gaithersburg. At
one salon,
he sexually
assaulted
a female
employee,
according
to court reGunn
cords.
“This
was the product of great
thought and great planning over
and over again,” Montgomery
County Assistant State’s Attorney John Lalos told Bernard.
In total, police pegged him
to seven armed robberies in
Montgomery County. He allegedly committed two others in
Delaware while on a business
trip there, lawyers said in court,
adding that the lack of apparent
motive made the situation all
the more “bizarre.”
Gunn’s lawyer and his family members attributed Gunn’s
crime binge to longtime emotional stress that had been building around his relationship with
his father, a veteran of the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, among
other factors.
“Mr. Gunn needs to own
this,” Lalos said, asking for a 70-

year sentence, with 40 years suspended, so Gunn would serve 30
years in prison.
Laura Kelsey Rhodes,
Gunn’s attorney, had asked for
18 months in jail, on top of the
18 months he has already spent
in jail, as well as probation and
GPS monitoring. She argued
that he had no prior criminal
history and would be more likely
to be rehabilitated in the Montgomery County Department of
Correction and Rehabilitation
jail than in a state prison —
where he would serve a longer
sentence — and with continued
therapy.
In sentencing Gunn to 16
years in prison, Bernard chose
a middle ground, saying, “I
can’t consider an 18-month
sentence.” Although Gunn had
accepted responsibility for his
actions, “this is not something
where you can just snap your
ﬁngers and this is going to be
done and over,” Bernard said.
Gunn pleaded guilty to
seven counts of armed robbery
and one count of fourth-degree
sex offense in December 2012.
Rhodes attributed Gunn’s
actions to a “psychotic break”
and argued that Gunn had been
under “huge pressure” in 2011.
“We know now he needs treament,” she said, calling his actions
“further evidence he wasn’t on
notice for how ill he was.”
Gunn’s victims, meanwhile,
said they carried the memories
and mental scars of his robberies.
“I feel like he’s taken something from me,” one victim said.
Said another: “I live my life
in fear, to be honest.”

Gunn said the time he has
spent in jail “opened his eyes.”
“There isn’t a day or night
where I don’t think about all the
suffering I caused you,” he said,
apologizing to his victims and
family.
Gunn’s crimes caught his
friends and family by surprise.
Family members said in court
that Gunn seemed unaware of
the ramiﬁcations of his actions
when he was arrested.
“It still doesn’t make sense
to me,” said Richard Duncan,
Gunn’s uncle. “That’s not the
Ramon I knew growing up.”
Lindsey Kiss, a Navy ensign
studying to be a physician, said
she met Gunn while the two
were in school in Florida.
He encouraged her to move
home to Michigan to prepare for
her exams to apply for medical
school, she said. But they quarreled when he learned that she
wanted to join the military.
After Gunn was arrested, she
visited him in the hospital.
“I was playing football and
got tackled,” she said he told her.
Later, he admitted he had
been arrested for armed robbery.
The two are still a couple,
she said in court. “I love him. I
think that he’s a really good person who made a really bad mistake. ... I believe in him.”
Gunn’s father visited him
earlier last week, Gunn said. He
hadn’t been expecting the visit,
but his father told him, “No matter what happens, we love you.”
“He’s never said anything
like that before,” Gunn said,
weeping.
sjbsmith@gazette.net

County farms to be
open for annual tour
Fruit, cider, wine will
be on display, for sale

n

BY

PEGGY MCEWAN
STAFF WRITER

Touring farms this weekend in Montgomery County
can include more than picking up some local produce.
Visitors to the Heyser Farm
in Silver Spring can also kick
back in the farm’s orchard
and enjoy a bottle of wine
amid the trees.
The farm, which specializes in peaches this time of
year and apples in the fall,
now has a winery license and
tasting room, said farm manager Mike Heyser.
The farm off New Hampshire Avenue works with Matt
Cimino, a winemaker with
Great Shoals Winery in Somerset County, to produce a
number of products including hard ciders and sparkling
wines. Farm tour visitors will
be able to taste the wines or
purchase them by the glass,
bottle or case.
Thirteen farms and animal facilities across Montgomery County will welcome
visitors, show off their products and offer special entertainment at the 24th annual
Farm Tour and Harvest Sale
on Saturday and Sunday.
Visitors to the farms can
see how a variety of fruits
and vegetables grow and how
eggs, cheese and meats are
produced during the tour.
Farm-produced products are
also for sale.
In addition to several
working farms, the tour will
include farm-related venues
such as Poplar Springs Animal Sanctuary in Poolesville,
a 400-acre animal refuge that
rescues abused and abandoned farm animals, and the
King Farm Dairy Mooseum in
Germantown.
The purpose of the Farm
Tour and Harvest Sale, which
started in 1989, is to promote
awareness among county residents of the scope of farming
in their own backyard, said
Jeremy Criss, agricultural services manager for the county.
Criss said there are 561
farms in Montgomery County,
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture 2007 census, 217 produce food you can
eat at the table, he said. The
rest are commodity farms —
those that raise wheat, soy-

beans, ﬁeld corn or hay.
The USDA census is published every ﬁve years, Criss
said and the 2012 report will
not be available until later
this year. A farm is deﬁned “as
any place from which $1,000
or more of agricultural products were produced and sold,
or normally would have been
sold, during the year,” according to the USDA.
Agriculture contributes in
excess of $243 million annually to the economy of Montgomery County and employs
about 10,000 people, Criss
said.
In the state, it is big business — the biggest.
“The No. 1 industry in the
state of Maryland is agriculture. It is the No. 1 business
in terms of both people employed and land mass use,”
Criss said. “Maryland agriculture is a $8.25 billion annual
business.”
Though there are so many
farms in Montgomery County,
Criss said, only about a dozen
can handle the more than
5,000 people expected to participate in the Farm Tour and
Harvest Sale this weekend.
“Over the years the program evolved to include those
farms with a farm market [almost exclusively],” he said.
Traditional farms were
not set up for so many visitors
in terms of parking and allowing people to roam through
their ﬁelds and barns.
“Not every farmer can
deal with hundreds and hundreds of people coming,” he
said.
Ben Allnutt of Homestead
Farm in Poolesville said Farm
Tour Weekend does not make
a difference in his bottom
line, because many of his regular customers visit different
farms that weekend, ones are
not regularly open.
Still, he said, it’s a good
day.
“And you can guarantee it
will be the hottest day of the
year,” he said.
The Farm Tour and Harvest Sale will be held rain or
shine from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday. Seven
of the sites participating in the
weekend tour are open both
Saturday and Sunday, and six
are open Saturday only. Speciﬁc information is available
at www.montgomerycountymd.gov/farmtour.
pmcewan@gazette.net

An initial investigation by Montgomery County Public Schools found
the work-study program at Rock Terrace School was “poorly managed” and
“money was inappropriately used,”
according to a Thursday letter from
Christopher S. Garran, associate superintendent of county high schools, to the
school’s parents.
However, there does not appear to
have been fraudulent activity by school
staff, the letter says.
The Montgomery County State’s
Attorney’s Ofﬁce is continuing to investigate the allegations with assistance
from the school system.
Thursday’s letter said the school’s
principal, Dianne G. Thornton, who
had been on administrative leave, announced her retirement effective Aug.
1.
The Rockville school serves developmentally disabled students.

“To date, the investigation has
found that there appears to have been
no attempt to intentionally defraud
students and their families of funds
provided to students as part of their
educational program,” the letter said.
The letter was posted on the
school’s website late last week and a recorded phone call went out to parents
and staff directing them to the letter,
said Dana Toﬁg, a spokesman for the
school system.
Parents claimed weeks ago that the
school’s administration had misappropriated the funds.
Toﬁg said he could not comment
on whether Thornton’s retirement was
related to the investigation, saying it
was a personnel matter.
Reached by phone on Monday,
Thornton said she was not interested in
commenting.
Toﬁg said the investigation involved
interviews with several parents and the
school’s staff.
Student bank account records at
the school were found “incomplete”
and the Montgomery County State’s
Attorney’s Ofﬁce will request account
records from the Educational Systems
Federal Credit Union using subpoenas,
the letter said.

Accounts were created at the credit
union to hold money students earned
through work-study experiences.
The school system also sent a second letter to the family of every student
known to have a credit union account
or who was in the payroll system, Toﬁg
said in an email, adding that families of
students from prior years were included.
“MCPS sent letters home to comply
with the Family Educational Rights and
Privacy Act so that we could share information that would allow the State’s Attorney’s ofﬁce to subpoena records from
the credit union and provide other information to assist in the State’s Attorney’s
investigation,” he said in the email.
The second letter said the school
system’s investigation, which is continuing, “has not found criminal wrongdoing.”
“Nevertheless, MCPS and the
State’s Attorney’s Ofﬁce believe that a
thorough investigation requires complete bank records on the credit union
accounts that were opened by students,
with staff assistance, as part of their
transition to work educational experience,” it said.
The school system’s initial investigation found that some money Rock
Terrace students had earned through

Citizen committee considering pay
levels for the next council, executive
Current elected leaders
already scheduled for
salary increase this year

n

BY

KATE S. ALEXANDER
STAFF WRITER

Montgomery County
Council and Executive Isiah
Leggett will get a raise this ﬁscal year, along with county
employees, but the next council and executive could be paid
even more.
Every four years, a sevenmember compensation committee convenes to evaluate
the salaries of the council, the
executive, the county sheriff
and the state’s attorney and
to recommend how much
those who will hold ofﬁce after the next election should
make.
The citizen committee’s
recommendation — if approved by the council — would
not change pay for current
county leaders, as that is prohibited by state law. But it will
establish salaries for those
elected in the November 2014
general election.
Regardless of what the
committee decides for the
future, the current crop of
elected ofﬁcials is slated for a
pay raise this ﬁscal year, which
started July 1, according to a
council news release.
Currently, members of the
all-Democratic council earn
$104,022 annually. The council presidents receives an additional salary, for a total of
$114,425.
Leggett (D) earns $180,250.
Sheriff Darren Popkin (D)
earns $154,000 and John McCarthy (D), the state’s attorney,
makes $199,000, according
to a county news release and
county salary data.
For council members,

Leggett and McCarthy, their
pay will go up at different points this ﬁscal year by
whichever is lower, the average
regional Consumer Price Index
for a 12-month period, or 3.25
percent — which is the same
amount the county approved
as a cost of living increase for
members of its general employees union, United Food
and Commercial Workers/
Municipal and County Government Employee’s Organization local 1994.
At most, council members’
salaries could increase approximately $3,381. Leggett’s
salary could go up as much
as approximately $5,858 and
McCarthy’s as much as about
$6,468.
Popkin also will get a salary bump this year. His pay
will increase 2.1 percent — the
amount approved for members of the police union, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge
35 — or the index, whichever
is lower.
Popkin’s salary could increase as much as $3,234.
The compensation committee is scheduled to issue its recommendations no
later than mid-September.
Residents have until Aug. 9
to comment on what their
elected leaders will make next
term.
Residents can e-mail comments to jean.arthur@montgomerycountymd.gov or mail
comments to Jean Arthur’s
attention at Compensation
Committee, Montgomery
County Council, 100 Maryland
Ave., 5th Floor, Rockville, MD
20850.
Every member of Montgomery’s current elected leadership either plans to run for
re-election or is considering a
different county ofﬁce.
Popkin and McCarthy
have filed to run again for

their present posts, according to the Maryland Board of
Elections.
Leggett has announced
that he will seek re-election as
executive. Councilman Philip
M. Andrews (D-Dist. 3) of
Gaithersburg has ﬁled to run
against Leggett for executive.
Councilwoman Valerie Ervin
(D-Dist. 5) of Silver Spring had
formed an exploratory committee to run for executive, but
has not publicly detailed her
plans.
Other members of the
council have indicated plans
to run for their seats in 2014.
kalexander@gazette.net

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the program had been put toward
school activities. Other work experience programs in the system’s high
schools generally treat the money as
the students’, according to the ﬁrst letter, which was posted on the school
website.
Some parents also were not told the
students were being paid or about the
bank accounts, the letter says.
The school’s work program will
continue during the upcoming school
year, as will other high schools’ programs, but the stipends will be put on
hold “until the district is able to clarify
whether these stipends should be
treated as earned income.”
Garran said in the letter that a community meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday at
the school will give parents the chance
to hear about the investigation from
school system staff and ask questions.
Toﬁg said it is likely that Larry Bowers, the school system’s chief operating ofﬁcer, Garran and members of the
system’s special education department
would be at the meeting.
He said he did not know if Thornton
would attend.
Lyda Astrove, a Rockville lawyer
and special-education advocate working with Rock Terrace parents, said she

was pleased to hear about the community meeting.
“I think that is an excellent ﬁrst step
toward bringing this all to a resolution,”
she said.
Astrove said she thinks that questions remain, including those about
how much the students made, where
exactly the money went and if the students will see the money.
“This isn’t a happy thing for all
these families that this happened but
this is the ﬁrst step on the road to making it right,” she said.
Tamara Clark, whose son recently
graduated and earned money while a
student there, said she was bothered
by the school system’s decision to suspend the stipends for all students in the
work-study programs.
“They [the students] have an opportunity to get paid for work, and now
they’re punishing everybody,” Clark
said.
Clark called the letter posted to the
website “wimpy” and said she still has a
lot of questions.
“I want to know where the money
went,” she said. “And I want to know
why us parents weren’t told.”
lpowers@gazette.net

Del. Heather Mizeur kicked
off her campaign for governor
with a series of events across the
state emphasizing the importance of service.
The events included a meeting Friday with supporters in
Glenarden for which people
were asked to bring supplies
for a Capitol Heights shelter for
women and children, restoring
a playground in Silver Spring on
Saturday, cleaning up marshlands in Cambridge on Sunday
and reading with campers at a
summer program in Baltimore

on Monday.
At the Silver Spring event,
about 30 volunteers braved intense heat to help repaint areas
for hopscotch, foursquare and
other games at Galway Elementary School, Mizeur (D-Dist. 20)
of Takoma Park said.
Mizeur, 40, joins a Democratic primary ﬁeld that includes
Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, who has
chosen Howard County Executive
Ken Ulman as his running mate.
Attorney General Douglas Gansler
has said he’ll run, but doesn’t plan
to start campaigning formally until the fall.
Harford County Executive
David Craig and Anne Arundel
Del. Ronald George (Dist. 37B)
are seeking the Republican
nomination.
Craig recently picked Del.
Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio (Dist.

37B) of Newcomb as his running
mate.
Mizeur said she’s emphasizing service in her campaign
because community service offers people a chance to talk and
work with people they otherwise
might not.
One of her focuses in ofﬁce
would be to create a statewide
service corps, along with rethinking how Maryland creates
jobs and approaches the criminal justice system.
“I think it’s time to fundamentally change the way we do
business, how we govern this
state,” Mizeur said.
She added that the comment wasn’t intended as a criticism of the administration of
Gov. Martin O’Malley (D).
rmarshall@gazette.net

THE GAZETTE

Page A-6

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

Man behind string of thefts, assault, robberies pleads guilty
Police tracked him by
GPS ankle bracelet he
wore as a condition
of a prior sentence

n

BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH
STAFF WRITER

The man behind a series of
robberies, thefts from autos, and
assaults in Germantown pleaded
guilty in Montgomery County Circuit Court on Thursday.
Elwood Antoneo Martin, 29,
of no ﬁxed address, pleaded guilty
to eight counts, including robbery, assault, and assorted theft
and rogue and vagabond charges.
He will spend up to 14 years
in prison, according to his plea
deal.
Elwood pleaded guilty to
one crime which took place April
1 in which he walked next to a
woman as she was getting into
her car, then opened her passen-

“He will have time to
think about the pain
and suffering he has
caused his victims.”
Ramon Korionoff, spokesman,
State’s Attorney’s ofﬁce
ger side door, said “excuse me,
ma’am,” and took her purse, wallet, money, and phone, according
to court records.
Martin also pleaded guilty
to another robbery, which took
place 10 days later, where he
grabbed a woman from behind
while she was getting mail from
her mailbox. In the struggle,
the woman was thrown to the
ground, striking her head so
hard she wasn’t able to remember all the details of the assault,
court records show.

Martin stole a purse, wallet,
MP3 player, and cellphone. After
she reported the incident, Fire
and Rescue personnel took her
to a clinic, where a doctor had
to stitch up a long cut running
up to her scalp, and the inside
of her cheek, which had been
bruised in the assault, according
to the records.
When Martin was arrested, a
judge set bail at $1 million.
Martin also pleaded guilty
to two robberies which took
place in January. In one of those,
while robbing a woman, Martin
pulled a diamond ring off of her
ﬁnger. In an event which took
place later that month, he told a
woman, “Give me the money or
I’ll slash your throat.”
Police were ultimately able
to connect Martin to the crimes
because he was being tracked
with a GPS ankle bracelet which
put him at the scenes of the
separate crimes, Montgomery
County Assistant State’s Attorney Steve Chaikin said in court,

adding that police also found recovered purses at spots mapped
by the GPS device. He had been
wearing the GPS device as a
condition of probation from a
previous crime which he had
been sentenced for, according
to court ofﬁcials.
And police recovered some of
thestolenitemsfromplaceswhere
Martin was staying or from people
who said they had purchased the
items from a man matching his
description, according to court
records and prosecutors.
Martin is scheduled to be
sentenced Sept. 26.
“To assault women as they
get their mail, drive their cars
or walk down the streets of
their neighborhoods and rob
them not only of their possessions but also rob them of their
peace of mind is anathema to
our civil society in Montgomery
County. Mr. Martin violated the
social contract and must now
pay the price. Serving at least 10
years behind bars ... he will have
time to think about the pain and
suffering he has caused his victims,” said Ramon Korionoff,
spokesman for the Montgomery
County State’s Attorney’s ofﬁce.
Adam Harris, Martin’s public defender, declined to comment on the case.
sjbsmith@gazette.net

The credit card thefts took
place in the most innocuous
of locations. In one case, cards
were taken from the purse of a
51-year-old woman picking up
her food order at a Panera in Aspen Hill. In the other case, cards
were stolen from a backpack
slung over the back of a 48-yearold woman’s wheelchair at the
Westﬁeld Montgomery Mall.
In both cases, the thief
charged thousands of dollars
to the cards.
On July 17, police released photos and video of the
woman they believe is behind
the two crimes. She is a woman
of medium build, wearing a
teal shirt in one picture, and a
dark sleeveless dress and sunglasses in another.
Detectives are asking for the
public’s help in identifying her.
“The suspect was just waiting for an opportunity,” Montgomery County Police Ofﬁcer
Rebecca Innocenti said. In
both crimes, the thief racked

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up thousands of credit card
charges in just a few hours.
“These suspects know they
have to go and use these credit
cards fast. They know it’s only
a matter of time before the victims cancel the accounts and
report that the cards are stolen,” she said.
According to the statement,
on June 30, the 48-year-old discovered her cards had been
stolen after she went shopping
at the Westﬁeld Montgomery
Mall on Democracy Boulevard
in Bethesda.
When she stopped at a gas
station, she realized that her
wallet had been stolen from her
backpack that she kept on the
back of her wheelchair.
The victim believes she
was targeted in part because
she was in a wheelchair, Innocenti said.
“It is a sad statement when
you see this suspect targeting a
person because of a perceived
weakness or disability,” Innocenti said.
After calling her credit
card company, the first victim learned that the thief had
charged about $3,000 on her
cards in just a few hours. The
cards had been used at several
locations in the Wheaton area,
the statement said.
The thief used the cards to
buy electronics and gift cards,
Innocenti said.
The second theft took place
10 days later, when a 51-year-old
woman was eating with family
members at the Panera on Connecticut Avenue in Aspen Hill,
according to the statement. The
woman placed her purse on a
chair while she went to pick-up
her food order at the counter.
Later that day, she realized
her credit cards had been stolen
from the purse. In about three
hours, the thief charged about
$11,000 on her cards.
“It’s easier when there are
more cards,” Innocenti said, explaining that the second victim
had at least four credit cards.
“If one credit card company
ﬂags the account, the suspect
still has ... additional cards to
commit fraud,” she said.
sjbsmith@gazette.net

THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

Page A-7

DAN GROSS/THE GAZETTE

From left, Chic to Chic Consignment Boutique president Ellen Didion, clothing consultant Jordan Ruth and security
guard Quentin Smith in the Gaithersburg shop. Ruth has worked at Chic to Chic for ﬁve years and Smith has been
there about two months.

Small businesses face health care uncertainty
n

‘We just can’t afford it’
BY

KEVIN JAMES SHAY
STAFF WRITER

Ellen Didion would like to
provide health insurance for her
20 employees.
But the more the president
of Chic to Chic, a high-end consignment boutique with stores
in Gaithersburg and Frederick,
and So Tres Chic & Tan in Gaithersburg, looks into the matter,
the more difﬁcult and expensive
it becomes.
“Health care costs are so
prohibitive, especially to small
businesses that are struggling to
stay in business,” Didion said. “It
would be nice to be able to afford
health insurance and would help
me stay competitive in attracting
and keeping good employees. But
we just can’t afford it.”
In early July, President
Barack Obama agreed to a
change in the Affordable Care
Act that would delay until 2015
the employer mandate portion
of the law, which will force employers with more than 50 employees to pay a penalty if they
don’t provide employees with
health insurance.
But individuals still have to
obtain health insurance by January or pay a penalty, which analysts say could cause businesses
that don’t offer insurance to lose
good workers to those that do.
Republicans and some business groups have been quick to
criticize Obama for not delaying
the individual mandate a year as
well. The House of Representatives this week passed legislation
that would delay the individual
mandate by a year, but the bill
faces opposition in the Senate
and by the Obama administration.
“If the president’s going
to give relief to businesses, he
ought to give relief from these
harsh mandates to families and
individuals, too,” House Speaker
John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a
statement.
Delaying implementation
of the individual mandate could
allow Congress time to make
more permanent changes to the
law that are needed, said Susan
Eckerly, senior vice president of
public policy for the National
Federation of Independent
Business, which represents
small businesses.
The employer mandate is
discouraging businesses from
creating more jobs and should
be repealed permanently, Eckerly said. A tax on insurers that
will be passed to small businesses also needs to be repealed,
she said.
“Small employers need permanent remedies to the most
harmful provisions in the law,
which are already impacting
their businesses and their employees,” Eckerly said. “Only
permanent relief will encourage
business owners to hire additional personnel.”
If the individual mandate is
not delayed, individuals without
health insurance will face paying the higher amount of either
$95 or 1 percent of their annual
taxable income next year. The
penalty will rise to $325 or 2 percent of income in 2015 and $695
or 2.5 percent of annual income
in 2016.
For the employer mandate
in 2015, businesses with more
than 50 employees that don’t
offer health insurance face a
penalty of $2,000 per employee,
minus the ﬁrst 30 workers. For
example, a non-providing company with 50 employees would
pay $40,000.

date could make it harder to hire
people who need insurance and
aren’t covered by their families,
she said. She has run the boutiques for more than 16 years.
“I love this business and
want to continue. I provide a
service to the community by recycling items,” Didion said. “But
this situation creates a lot of uncertainty.”
It is unfortunate that there
are insurance mandates, but
that could be for the better, as
having more people with insurance would help stabilize the
system and potentially reduce
what people with insurance
pay to cover emergency-room
visits that those without health
insurance make, said Clark Kendall, founder and president of
Rockville-based Kendall Capital
Management.
Kendall also co-chairs the
Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business Committee. The chamber
has organized several meetings
lately on the law, including a
presentation in June by Julie
Verratti, an adviser with the U.S.
Small Business Administration.
Some clients of Kendall’s
ﬁnancial advisory ﬁrm are near
the 50-employee mark. Because
of the mandate, Kendall said
many of them are weighing their
choices very carefully.
“They are looking into
whether they want to go over
that threshold or not,” he said.
Among small businesses
that will be affected by the employer mandate, one-half of
respondents to a recent online
survey by Harris Interactive said
they will either cut hours to re-

Could make it
harder to hire
While the employer mandate will not impact Didion’s
business, the individual man-

duce full-time employees or replace full-time employees with
part-timers to avoid the mandate. Some 24 percent said they
will reduce hiring to stay under
50 employees.
Kendall provides his four
employees with health insurance. “Overall, we try to compensate for people working
hard, working smart,” he said.
Jerry Therrien, president of
Therrien Waddell Construction
Group in Gaithersburg, provides health insurance for his 26
employees as well, but some of
them opt out of it.
“Some choose to use their
spouse’s plan,” he said.
Therrien doesn’t believe
employees are applying for jobs
simply for the beneﬁts.
The Maryland Health Benefit Exchange, a marketplace
being organized by the state
to allow individuals and small
businesses to purchase insurance in Maryland, is expected to
open by October.
The health insurance law remains the top concern for small
businesses, according to the
Harris survey, which was done
this month for the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce.
Some 71 percent of smallbusiness respondents said the
health care law makes it harder to
hire, and only 30 percent said they
were prepared for the law. Some
25 percent admitted they didn’t
know the exact requirements.
Katie Pohlman contributed
to this report.

1911501

kshay@gazette.net
kpohlman@gazette.net

125751G

125751G

THE GAZETTE

Page A-8

Dear — and clean — Abby
Mercedes Booker
of Forestville and
Christian Rivera
of Germantown,
along with other
Dogtopia employees, volunteer
their time Sunday
as they bathe
dogs, including
Abby, a Pomeranian, for donations to Veterans
Moving Forward
and America’s
VetDogs. The
fundraiser was
held at the dogcare store’s North
Bethesda location.
TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE

1869684

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

County Council passes tree bills
One protects roadside
trees; other protects
trees on private property
n

BY

KATE S. ALEXANDER
STAFF WRITER

Whether on private land or
along county streets, for nearly
every tree that residents remove,
Montgomery County will now
require three trees planted in its
place.
In his work “The Lorax,”
Dr. Seuss created a character
who spoke for the trees and on
Tuesday, Councilwoman Valerie
Ervin (D-Dist. 5) of Silver Spring
said Montgomery County Council was speaking for its canopy
and the trees that line county
roads by passing two bills regulating the removal of trees. Both

bills go into effect in March 2014.
The bills seek to protect the
trees with permits and fees imposed on residents and builders
who remove them.
With the ﬁrst bill passed, the
council took steps to preserve
trees along county roads.
Known as bill 41-12, Roadside Trees, the bill requires anyone wanting to trim, remove or
otherwise work on a tree in the
county’s right of way obtain a
county permit ﬁrst and pay to
replace nearly every tree removed with three more.
It took 19 drafts and multiple
last-minute amendments, but
the council passed the bill, 7-2.
Councilwoman Nancy Floreen and Councilman George
L. Leventhal (D-At Large) of Takoma Park opposed the bill.
State law already regulates
roadside trees by requiring those
who cut one down get a permit
from the Maryland Department
of Natural Resources.
However, in 2009, state lawmakers gave counties leeway to
impose stricter regulations, if
they saw ﬁt.
Floreen (D-At Large) of Garrett Park called the roadside tree
bill unnecessary legislation.
Under the new law, the
county will require an additional, local permit for roadside
tree work, which will cost residents and builders about $135.
And for nearly every tree removed, three new trees must be
planted.
Only trees that pose a danger would be exempt from the
permit fee and the requirement
to replace it, as would existing
stumps or stumps left behind by
county or utility work.
Pepco and other utility companies would not be subject to
the new law.
It costs Montgomery $250 to
plant a shade tree, and $150 to
plant an ornamental, or smaller,
tree, according to county staff.
The roadside tree bill would
require replacing a removed tree
with one tree on site and paying
into a special fund to plant two
others. The county will use the
money in the fund to plant trees
in areas where it has very few

trees, like its urban districts.
But if a new tree cannot be
planted where the old one was
removed, the permit holder
must pay into the fund for that
tree.
While the ﬁrst bill regulates
roadside trees, and supplements existing state law, the
second bill, known as bill 3512, Tree Canopy Conservation,
goes where the county has not
ventured before, said Councilman Roger Berliner (D-Dist.
1) of Bethesda. The bill passed
unanimously.
“We are making a very
significant advance in terms
of protecting our tree canopy
in our county,” he said of the
canopy bill. “We are doing
something that we have not
ever done before, which is saying the trees on private property have community value
that must be reﬂected and we
are going to ﬁght retain canopy
throughout our county.”
County forest conservation
law protects the canopy on lots
larger than 40,000 square feet, but
the Tree Canopy Conservation
law protects it on smaller lots.
The intent was to offset the
effects of infill development
where often trees are removed
to make way for new or larger
buildings.
Like the roadside tree bill,
the tree canopy bill would require residents and builders to
plant three shade trees for every
one they remove. But unlike the
roadside bill, which would only
apply to county right of way, the
canopy bill would affect private
property.
Under the new law, residents
can choose between planting
new shade trees or paying a fee
to the county. The county would
use that fee to plant new trees in
areas that have few trees.
The fees range from $750 for
small areas to as much as $3,750
for areas between 20,001 and
40,000 square feet and would
apply to anyone who is required
to obtain a permit to control
sediment.
kalexander@gazette.net

New animal adoption
center set to open Nov. 1
Old, new shelters will
overlap a few weeks,
Manger says

n

126096G

BY AGNES BLUM
STAFF WRITER

The new $20 million Montgomery County Animal Services
and Adoption Center in Derwood is slated to open on Nov.
1, Montgomery County Police
Chief J. Thomas Manger said at
a County Council Public Safety
Committee hearing Thursday.
The county has contracted
with the Montgomery County
Humane Society to continue
operating the current animal
shelter on Rothgeb Drive until
March 1, ﬁve months after the
new shelter opens. Two shelters
— old and new — will be open
simultaneously during the transition months.
TheMontgomeryCountyHumane Society has run the county
shelter since the 1960s, providing
animal services such as adoption,
neutering and licensing on a $1.6
million annual budget.
What role the nonproﬁt will
play in the new shelter has not
yet been decided, Manger said,
but it will help with the move to
the new facility.
“There’s going to have to be
some overlap during the transition,” Manger told Chairman
Philip M. Andrews (D-Dist. 3)
and Councilman Marc Elrich
(D-At large), both committee
members. “We will likely be operating both shelters for some
period of time. I don’t think
it’s going to be months, by any
means, but it could be a couple
of weeks or more.”
Councilman Roger Beliner
(D-Dist. 1), a committee member, was not at the meeting.
One of the major changes at
the new shelter will be the position of agency director. It no
longer will be ﬁlled on a rotating
basis by a sworn police captain.
Instead, it will be a non-sworn
permanent position in the police department.
The county is running a
background check on “our best
candidate,” Manger said, and if

all goes well, there will be a new
director within two weeks.
The new, larger shelter will
cost more money to run, but
Manger and others in the police department said there were
ways to recoup that money besides depending on taxpayers.
One example would be to aggressively apply for more grant
money. Another way to raise
revenue would be to revamp the
county’s licensing program.
All dogs and cats, 4 months
and older, that live in Montgomery County must be licensed.
There are about 400,000 pets
in the county, according to the
police.
For pets under 1 year, there’s
no fee. After that, spayed or neutered pets cost $12 a year and
unaltered pets cost $25 a year.
The compliance rate hovers at around 7 percent, said
Bruce Meier, a county management and budget specialist, who
called that number “woeful.”
Other comparable jurisdictions are in the 25 to 30 percent
range, he said.
The county has been taking
in about $400,000 annually in
licensing fees for the past few
years, Montgomery County Police Capt. Michael Wahl said.
“There really has been basically no real outreach done in
that area over the past years,”
Wahl said.
One way to make licensing easier would be to put the
whole process online, which is
happening across the country.
Elrich discussed getting veterinarians involved in licensing animals, suggesting paying
them for every pet license they
help secure.
The new shelter will mean
starting from scratch in many
ways, Manger said. To help do
that, he hired consultant Renee
Harris of the San Diego Humane
Society to help integrate “best
practices” into the new facility.
Harris produced a report
that Manger called a “great blueprint.” He said the county will
continue to get feedback from
her over the coming months.
ablum@gazette.net

THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

Page A-9

Maryland agency amassed 85 million license plate scans last year
BY

ELIZABETH WAIBEL
STAFF WRITER

A Maryland agency collected more
than 85 million pictures of license plates
last year, according to a report by the
American Civil Liberties Union. The
pictures were taken by devices called
automatic license plate readers, which
scan and record tag numbers on passing vehicles quicker than an ofﬁcer can.
The ACLU released the report

RADIATION

Continued from Page A-1
across the street from the water
tower on Wootton Avenue, said
he’s been asking the town for
years to study the health effects
of the towers.
Orr said he became more
concerned when his son was diagnosed with testicular cancer
about four years ago, at the age
of 25.
The family’s cat also had to
be put down in May with a tumor that Orr said was the size of
his ﬁst.
Orr said he doesn’t put a lot
of stock in the study’s ﬁndings.
“I’m not surprised,” he said.
“They paid the [company].”

REPLACEMENT

Continued from Page A-1
An informal collection of
representatives from various
minority groups are planning
a meeting — likely next week,
although no ﬁrm date has been
set — to discuss whether anyone
is interested in challenging Feldman for the Senate seat, said Tufail Ahmad, a longtime activist in
District 15 politics.
Ahmad said his issue was not
with Feldman — who he called a
good friend and qualiﬁed candidate whose career Ahmad has
always supported — but a need
for more discussion before the
endorsement of Feldman.
Feldman pointed out that
he’s been endorsed by many
other ofﬁcials and groups, particularly Garagiola and other
District 15 delegates — Kathleen
M. Dumais (D) of Rockville and
Aruna Miller (D) of Darnestown.
People who thought their

1889684

July 17 after submitting information
requests last year to almost 600 law
enforcement agencies in 38 states, including Maryland. About 300 agencies
provided information for the report.
Readers scan license plates on
passing vehicles to check them against
a “hot list” for things such as missing
persons and reports of stolen vehicles.
In some places, police store license
plate images for possible use in future
investigations, but some organiza-

tions, including the ACLU, have voiced
concern that ofﬁcials could misuse the
data to track people’s movements.
In addition to using data locally,
about three-fourths of law enforcement
agencies in the state also share data
with the Maryland Coordination and
Analysis Center, according to the ACLU
report. The center collected more than
85 million such records in 2012.
Montgomery County Police have 22
plate readers. Cpl. Kevin Marston said the

A representative from RSI said
there was no one at the company
who could comment Tuesday.
The potential health risks
posed by radio-frequency energy and electromagnetic ﬁelds
still are being studied.
According to the National Institutes of Health, some studies
have found a faint link between
exposure to electromagnetic
ﬁelds and childhood leukemia,
but other studies have found no
link between such exposure and
other childhood cancers.
Among adults, “[electromagnetic fields] may reduce
heart rate and interfere with
brain electrical activity during
sleep. This may or may not affect your health,” according to
the institutes’ website.

According to the website for
the American Cancer Society,
“Some people have expressed
concern that living, working or
going to school near a cell phone
tower might increase the risk of
cancer or other health problems.
At this time, there is very little
evidence to support this idea.”
The level of radio-frequency
energy from cellular towers is relatively low compared to gamma
rays, X-rays and ultraviolet rays,
all of which have been proven to
increase the risk of cancer, according to the society’s website.
The website says the level
of exposure to radiation from
living near a cell tower is usually many times lower than the
amount of exposure from using
a cellphone.

voices weren’t heard at the
beginning of the process have
had a chance to weigh in and
can still express their opinions
until the September deadline,
he said.
While viversity is a legitimate issue, the seat needs to be
ﬁlled by a strong candidate who
can defend it in the 2014 election, Feldman said.
Albornoz said the appointment process will be open to
anyone interested, and the
committee will do its “full due
diligence” in evaluating every
candidate.
The district has been blessed
with great elected ofﬁcials, as
well as many qualiﬁed residents
interested in holding ofﬁce, said
Jeff Williams, chairman of the
District 15 Democratic Caucus.
Many people have expressed interest in running for
a seat, but there is no open seat
until the central committee announces its nominee to replace
Garagiola, Williams said.

The appointment to succeed
Garagiola will be the ﬁrst step in
the process, Williams said, with
someone appointed to ﬁll Feldman’s seat if he gets the Senate
spot.
Whoever is appointed to ﬁll
Garagiola’s seat will have to run
for re-election in the 2014 election.
Albornoz said the central
committee is focused on looking for the best possible candidate to ﬁll Garagiola’s seat, and
hasn’t given any real thought to
the 2014 race.
Williams said he hopes District 15 will have a “spirited” primary for the Democratic spot on
the 2014 ballot, with a lively but
friendly debate of the issues.
Williams said the caucus
hopes to play a signiﬁcant role
in helping District 15 voters
meet the various candidates
and become familiar with their
positions.
rmarshall@gazette.net

department takes the same precautions
to protect records as with other data.
“[We] only use it for criminal justice
purposes,” Marston said.
MontgomeryCountypoliceadopteda
policyinJanuarythatcallsforauditingdata
ﬁles“onaregularbasis”andpurginginformation that can’t be used for law enforcement purposes. The department currently
erases all data after a year, Marston said.
Rockville changed its license reader

However, radio-frequency
levels from towers can lead to
other medical problems, such
as sleep disorders, headaches,
nausea and a ringing sensation
in the ears, said Ray Pealer, a
Vermont-based public health
advocate who runs the website
emrsafety.net. Pealer said he’s

spoken with Orr’s family about
the Poolesville situation.
The only federally mandated
regulations for radio-frequency
energy are the guidelines set up
by the FCC, which are based on
how much radiation is needed
to cause an increase in body
temperature, he said.

policy in April to limit how long police
can access data from the devices. Under the new policy, Rockville police delete such data after 30 days.
Gaithersburg’s policy, established
in 2009, says license data “not of further legitimate investigative value will
be routinely purged” on a schedule determined by the police chief.
Takoma Park deletes its data after 30
days and does not share it with the state.
But Pealer said biological
effects can be found at levels
signiﬁcantly less than the FCC
guidelines.
Yost said there have been
no discussions on whether any
other testing would be done.
rmarshall@gazette.net

THE GAZETTE

Page A-10

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

The not-so-free ride

Starting early leads some to burn out
Sherwood coach says
early pressure can push
students away from their sports
n

BY JACOB

BOGAGE

SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE

Duncan Hawvermale wrestled from
ages 5 to 15. He spent his ﬁrst two years
at James H. Blake High School on the
Bengals’ squad, competing in the 103and 112-pound weight classes.
Whenhisjuniorseasonrolledaround,
he chose not to go out for the team. The
sheer repetition of day-after-day practices got boring, he said. A lifelong snowboarder, he was barred from hitting the
slopes while his team was on the mat.
“I just didn’t want to put the work
in anymore. I got tired of it,” Hawvermale said. “I guess I just didn’t love it as
much as I used to.”
Hawvermale is among the athletes
who, in their latter years of high school
or at the beginning of college, discontinued sports they’ve played their
whole lives.
With children focusing on a single
sport at younger ages, players such as
Hawvermale can burn out easier as they
move through the ranks.
“I think that there is a ton of pressure out there,” Sherwood High School
softball coach Ashley Barber-Strunk
wrote in an email. “School (speciﬁc
classes to take, grades and scores),
family pushing them to be the best,
and burnout would be among the top
reasons students do not go on after college. These kids are playing year-round
when they are younger and do it more
vigorously as they get older. I think others don’t see a future beyond college
and would rather just not have to worry
about something they have been doing
year-round since they are young.”
Barber-Strunk said, in her experience, maybe one of six softball players will actually pursue softball after
high school, either intercollegiately or
through intramurals. The emphasis on
competition at an early age, she said,
turns players off from participating as
they get older.
“The emphasis on being the best
certainly plays a role,” she said. “I think
athletes need to relax more and not
stress so much.”
Sherwood rising senior Kasey Rosen
played varsity softball her freshman
and sophomore years before dropping
the sport just before her junior season.
She said she played softball for nearly a
decade, and after coming off knee surgery a month before the season began,
opted to sit the spring out.
“I’d been playing for so long and I
kind of just needed a break,” she said.
“Some of my friends felt the same way.
Some people can keep going and enjoy
the sport like when they start, but some
people just lose the love of the game.”
After missing spending time with

ELITE

Continued from Page A-1
high school competition. The
Patriots’ 2013 county title was
their fourth straight.
But those remarkable accomplishments don’t guarantee
a college scholarship, and rarely
garner attention from most
NCAA Division I college coaches.
Recruitment and scouting by
college coaches is done almost
entirely outside of high school
competition, said Montgomery
County high school coaches in a
wide range of sports.
“A lot of the really good Division III schools are interested in
him — Hopkins, Tufts, Amherst.
But like, Yale, [my daughter] is
going there and I knew his academics were identical to hers.
So, I emailed the tennis coach
and he was super nice. But he
emailed back and said, ‘Yes,
[Bera] has the academic piece,
but I only look at the top 40 to 50
players [in the country],’” ﬁfthyear Wootton boys tennis coach
Nia Cresham said.
Bera, the 2013 Gazette Player
of the Year, might have been
a lot closer to that high level
had he not foregone the spring
USTA tournament circuit each
of the past three years to play
for Wootton and work on his
academics. He almost certainly
would be better than his current
position of No. 814 (of 2,101) in
the U.S. Tennis Association’s
Boys 18s national rankings.
It’s not a decision Bera regrets at all, he said. High school
tennis is important to him; he
said his college search is more
catered to balancing academics
with athletics.
But that’s not an attitude —

“

SOME PEOPLE
CAN KEEP GOING
AND ENJOY THE
SPORT LIKE WHEN
THEY START, BUT
SOME PEOPLE JUST
LOSE THE LOVE OF
THE GAME.

”

PHOTO FROM KASEY ROSEN

Rising Sherwood senior Kasey Rosen played softball for nearly a decade before giving the sport up in high school. “I’d been playing for so long, I just needed a break,” she said.
friends and family — her older brother
Andrew was poised to leave for college —
Rosensaidshedecidedshe’dhadenough.
“I kind of found a way to get used
to it and work my schedule around
sports,” she said. “But it just got a little
too much. I missed doing stuff with my
friends and family. My friends had all
this free time and I always wondered
what that would be like.”
Both Hawvermale and Rosen said
they each miss their respective sports.
Hawvermale said wrestling always
reminded him of friendly roughhousing
with his older brother as a child.
Rosen said her father gets nostalgic
aboutthegametheysharedasshegrewup.

high school over outside participation — that everyone shares.
Historically, athletics have
been an important part of the
American high school culture.
Competing well and winning
state championships might be the
ultimategoal,butstudent-athletes
should enjoy and learn from the
journey to achieving such feats,
Montgomery County high school
coaches agreed. Recent studies indicate that participation in sports
can help student-athletes in many
facets of life, including academically and socially.
But in this economy, finding ways to get into college and
decrease the growing costs of a
continuing education has developed into a competitive sport of
its own. As the ﬁght for athletic
scholarships reaches new heights,
participation in high school sports
could become more of a burden
than an outlet for Montgomery
County’s top athletes.
Three of the county’s best
boys tennis players — University
of Richmond recruit Alex Hahn
(Wootton) and Walt Whitman
rising seniors Aries Wong and
Sean Ngo, the two-time state
boys doubles champions — did
not compete during the 2012-13
high school season.
Several top boys soccer players in the fall skipped playing on
their high school team. The reason was a new rule that prohibits U.S. Soccer Academy players
from playing high school ball.
The U.S. Soccer Development Academy is a partnership
between U.S. Soccer and the
nation’s top youth club teams
to provide the country’s most
promising players with an environment designed to produce
future national team players.
The majority of exposure to

“I kind of wish I was out there
again,” she said. “I miss the atmosphere.”
But Rosen moved on to play volleyball for the Warriors, where she was part
of back-to-back-to-back state championships. She said she doesn’t know if
she wants to play varsity volleyball in
college, but is convinced she wants to
at least play club or recreationally.
“It’s so addicting,” she said.
Hawvermale’s old wrestling skills
certainly came in handy recently — at
about 5 a.m. on June 30 in Jackson, N.J.
Hawvermale, 22, was a bit groggy
walking back to his car. In bare feet and
basketball shorts, he was set to drive

four hours from a friend’s graduation
party back to College Park. He needed
to be there in time to work the 9 a.m.
shift at Bill’s Backyard Barbeque.
That’s when Hawvermale noticed
the trunk of his Chevy Malibu was open
and a stranger was riﬂing through his
belongings. A second person was sitting
in his front seat toying with his GPS.
“The ﬁrst thing I see is the trunk
wide open mysteriously,” Hawvermale
said. “The ﬁrst guy said he was sorry
and ran away. The second guy tried to
put down my possessions and asked if
I could just let him go.”
Hawvermale said that wasn’t going
to happen. When the perpetrator tried

TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE

Thomas S. Wootton High School’s Titas Bera, The Gazette’s Player of the
Year in boys tennis, decided against playing on the U.S. Tennis Association’s
tournament circuit so he could play for the Patriots.
college recruitment comes from
playing high-level travel soccer,
or lacrosse, or volleyball, and so
on. It comes from competing in
college showcase tournaments,
high school coaches agreed.
Athletes in individual
sports such as tennis and golf
must support themselves in a
year-round ranking system by
competing in as many tournaments as possible. Bera has a
jam-packed summer tournament schedule to make up for
lost time. He’s currently ranked
No. 43 in the USTA Mid-Atlantic
Section and hopes to ﬁnish the

summer inside the top 20.
“[Club] is where 99 percent
of college recruiting goes on”
second-year James H. Blake High
boys soccer coach David Edlow
said. “Sherwood lost its goalie [to
the Academy system]. That was
huge. Bethesda-Chevy Chase lost
a bunch, Whitman. Northwood,
Clarksburg. I think you’re seeing
the quality drop. It’s not going
to disappear — there’s plenty of
people who want to play. But the
top goalkeepers and goal scorers
are gone.”
Time is the biggest obstacle,
coaches agree.

to run, Hawvermale’s 10 years of wrestling experience kicked in.
As the second intruder tried to ﬂee,
Hawvermale used a wrestling move
called “leg riding” — when standing
above an opponent, a wrestler twists
his leg between his foe’s calf and thigh
to bring him down. This freed Hawvermale’s hands, so he could calmly reach
into his pocket and call police.
He restrained the intruder in that
hold until authorities arrived. Hawvermale got to work on time.
“Your moves in wrestling stay with
you,” he said.
jbogage@gazette.net

A rule in the Maryland Public
Secondary Schools Athletic Association handbook states that
students may participate in the
same sport outside of the school
during that sport’s season —
some states forbid even that —
but those outside commitments
cannot conﬂict with high school
practice and competition.
For the most part, high school
practice — a mix of elite-level
individuals and “normal” high
school players — is not preparing
these aspiring scholarship athletes to play at the level in which
they are competing, high school
coaches agreed. Therefore, they
are doubling, sometimes tripling,
up on training sessions. For example, the county’s top swimmers tend to practice nine times
a week, before and after school on
certain days.
They must ﬁt in their school
work in between.
“It’s so tough to juggle everything. It creates a lot of pressure.
It’s very difﬁcult for these kids to
be competitive and play for high
school. I think there needs to be
a little more ﬂexibility. I think
there can be a happy medium,”
Cresham said.
Some sports are affected
more than others. Longtime
Winston Churchill girls soccer
coach Haroot Hakopian said
club and high school teams
have found a way to coexist in
the girls soccer world, with club
teams giving way to high school
training in the fall season.
Wootton girls basketball
coach Maggie Dyer said Amateur Athletic Union teams are
almost non-existent during the
winter months.
High school sports, of
course, still have the same allure.
Stone Ridge School of the

Sacred Heart rising junior swimmer Katie Ledecky won an Olympic gold medal in the summer
of 2012 but was adamant about
her desire to remain a part of
the Gators squad in 2012-13.
The distance freestyler’s smile
seemed just as bright in February — when she set two national
high school records en route to
winning the 200- and 500-yard
freestyle events at this winter’s
Washington Metropolitan Interscholastic Swimming and Diving
Championships — as when she
shocked the world by winning the
800-meter freestyle in London.
After the Metros, Ledecky
spoke of the important role that
high school swimming — the
opportunity to represent her
school — still plays in her life
amid her international success
and rapidly growing fame.
“I’m committed to my
high school team — no doubt
I wanted to swim high school.
It’s a great chance to be with
my Stone Ridge teammates and
my friends from high school,”
Ledecky said at the time.
Friends. Teammates. Representing your school.
Currently, those three main
factors still seem to outweigh the
juggling act many elite high school
athletes are enduring, for the most
part, high school coaches agreed.
But many said they fear that might
not always be the case.
“It’s a hard decision to make.
But it’s always a different feeling
competing with a team. It’s a lot
more fun — you’re with your
friends,” Bera said.
jbeekman@gazette.net

THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

Page A-11

The not-so-free ride

Doctors say serious injuries among youth athletes increasing
More than 3.5 million children
under 14 receive treatment for
sports-related injuries each year
n

BY JENNIFER BEEKMAN
STAFF WRITER

Normal 7-year-old boys should not
be doubled over in excruciating back
pain.
Knee discomfort should not prevent an 8-year-old girl from frolicking,
carefree, with her friends.
In the past ﬁve to seven years, however, sports-related ailments such as
these are becoming more common,
Montgomery County-based physical
therapist Stacy King said.
King has worked with many county
athletes, including Walt Whitman High
School rising junior basketball player Annabelle Leahy, who recently underwent
her second knee surgery to repair a torn
anterior cruciate ligament in as many
years. Leahy had her ﬁrst surgery when
she was 12.
“I have been practicing since 1999
and within the niche I have, I treat a lot
of athletes. Certainly, the average age is
coming down. Looking at the median,
it’s certainly getting younger. It’s sad to
see a kid who is 8 or 7 coming in with
such pain. I’m like, ‘This kid is so young.
Why is he here?’” King said.
The specialization of athletes in one
particular sport at increasingly younger
ages has opened youth to many injury
problems, said William Levine, the
director of the Columbia University
Medical Center’s Sports Medicine Department of Orthopaedic surrgery for
16 years.
In 2007, the American Orthopaedic
Society for Sports Medicine initiated
the Sports Trauma and Overuse Prevention (STOP) campaign because of
the rapid increase in sports-related injuries in children. Levine is chairman of
the advisory board.
Sixteen years ago, Levine said, he
rarely saw athletes under the age of 14
with shoulder and elbow injuries, or

BILL RYAN/THE GAZETTE

Physical therapist Stacy King helped Walt Whitman High School rising junior basketball player Annabelle Leahy recover from two knee operations she has had in the past two years.
tears to the anterior cruciate ligament
in the knee. ACL injuries have become
more common, though, and no longer
stand out, he said.
“The beauty of playing multiple
sports is it allows body parts to recover
while others are being strengthened or
stressed. [Early specialization] is a major change.
“Usually, I’ll say, ‘Who’s your favorite baseball player?’ They’ll say Derek
Jeter. I’ll say, ‘What do you think Derek
Jeter is doing during the offseason?’
One thing he doesn’t do is he doesn’t
play baseball. He doesn’t throw; he
doesn’t bat. He lets his body recover
from a 162-game season. Then, usually
the light bulb goes off,” Levine said.
More than 5 million athletes under
the age of 18 are suffering sports-related
injuries each year and approximately
half of these cases are due to overuse,
according to the Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention.
About 3.5 million children under
the age of 14 receive medical treatment
for sports injuries each year, according
to the STOP website. Children ages 5 to
14 account for nearly 40 percent of all
sports-related injuries treated in hospitals.
In baseball and softball alone, the
number of serious shoulder and elbow
injuries in young athletes has increased
ﬁvefold.
The quest for scholarships, as a
way to afford college, helps explain the
trend.
Youth sports has become a huge
moneymaking industry, longtime Winston Churchill High School girls soccer
coach Haroot Hakopian said. As more
young athletes compete for scholarship
money, there’s pressure to maintain an
edge.
Each sport has become year-round

rather than seasonal. Even in professional sports, Hakopian said, athletes
cannot train all year and expect their
bodies to hold up.
Continually training for specific
skills then creates an imbalance, especially in the bodies of younger athletes
who are still growing and maturing.
Athletes who intend to pursue a
sport in college eed to specialize at
some point. But high school age is an
appropriate time, Hakopian said.
“There is a lot of stress in this area,”
King said. “Parents feel like [their kids]
have to pick a sport at a younger age
and it’s perpetuating a problem. When
I was a kid, we did all sports. We didn’t
specialize until we were closer to high
school and it allows our body to use
muscles in different ways.
“Instead of pushing, you also do pulling activities. If you’re a soccer player and
you’re a right-side defender, you’re do-

On national letter of intent signing
day, cameras ﬂash and prized senior
high school athletes slide on sleek,
brand new caps with college logos in
front of television crews. They have
chosen where they will play sports in
college.
Young men and women are getting
a taste super-stardom months before
they receive their high school diploma.
Now, there are online recruiting
consultants to help colleges ﬁnd those
star players.
“The angle I tend to look at it from
is the athletes with the requisite skills
should have a chance to play in college,” BeRecruited.com CEO Vishwas
Prabhakara said.
BeRecruited is the largest website
in the burgeoning online recruiting
industry, with 1.5 million athlete subscribers and more than 25,000 college
coaches logging on to search for players in the last year.
Any athlete can create a free proﬁle
on BeRecruited and post highlight videos, statistics, grades and standardized
test scores. The goal is to let coaches
see at a glance whether an athlete will
ﬁt into their school or system.
Athletes can upgrade to a deluxe proﬁle package that provides a
monthly report of views that a proﬁle
generated. The cost is either $19.99 a
month or a one-time $99 fee. College
coaches aren’t charged to use the service.

SCHOLARSHIPS

Continued from Page A-1
For all of the money they
spend on the finest coaches,
world-class teams, and stateof-the-art equipment, there is a
slim chance it will be returned in
the form of an athletic scholarship.
According to recent NCAA
statistics, only 2 percent of high
school athletes are awarded
scholarships to compete in
college. Even then, the average scholarship is only $11,000.
Most parents easily can spend
more than that on youth sports
by the time their children reach
college.
“Huge. It’s huge,” Bullis boys
basketball coach Bruce Kelley

“You have your Rivals.com, your
Scouts.com — those kids don’t need
recruiting services,” BeRecruited
spokesman Vince Wladika said. “Those
are the .001 percent of kids who are going to get recruited by the Alabamas or
Notre Dames.
“That means there are 99.999 percent who want to progress in their
sport, but need another bump. These
services are for the 99.999 percent, not
for the super blue-chippers.”
University of Tulsa women’s rowing coach Kevin Harris said that for well
over half of the athletes on his team,
Tulsa recruiters used BeRecruited to
reach them.
“It’s really important for us to use
these services because getting people
to pay attention to a rowing school
in Oklahoma is tough,” Harris said.
“Truthfully, everybody uses it, I just
don’t know if they use it as much as we
do.”
Salisbury University softball coach
Margie Knight said she fears too many
student-athletes are using recruiting websites to do the work for them.
Marketing is a two-way street, she said,
and just as athletes like the personal
touches coaches put on recruiting tips,
coaches like it, too.
“A student-athlete still has to be
the one to market themselves,” Knight
said. “If I’m just getting blasts from
BeRecruited, I delete them. It’s not the
student-athlete who’s interested; it’s
the corporation.”
The approach each service takes to
corner a market-share is as different as
coaching philosophies.
BeRecruited focuses on the selfmotivated athlete, Prabhakara and
Wladika said. The service has no direct communication with coaches or
recruiters. Players ﬁll in their proﬁles

said about the cost parents must
pay to ﬁnance their children’s
athletic endeavors. Kelley’s son
plays basketball.
“People talk about the parents being more involved than
ever. ... The parents are taking kids to practice constantly.
They’re paying for extra camps
and teams. The parents are involved right from the beginning
with transportation and paying
for these camps and teams. ... I
can’t quantify [the cost]. That is
a big part of the deal.”
Some parents might see this
as an investment, a security deposit that will be returned in the
form of a Division I scholarship.
The major colleges compete
in Division I. Division II schools,
such as Bowie State University,
offer fewer athletic scholarships

without the oversight of their high
school coach.
“It’s the kids’ job to be proactive to
keep their proﬁle up to date, so their
proﬁle looks good for coaches,” Wladika said.
Popular video editing software
Hudl also has a recruiting element,
though its placed squarely in the hands
of high school coaches.
As coaches use the program to analyze game ﬁlm and share it with their
teams, players can cut footage into personal recruiting videos and post it on
their individual proﬁle page.
“From the core, we want to help
coaches win and that’s one of the tools
we give them,” Hudl recruiting spokesman Kyle Bradburn said.
Hudl does not charge athletes for
the service. Instead, teams purchase
the program and grant access to each
of their athletes.
Players can go online to view ﬁlm
and create highlights, or they can use
Hudl’s mobile app. On the iPhone version, Bradburn said, double-tapping
the screen on a selected portion of a
video clip automatically creates a highlight.
When coaches think their players
are ready to release recruiting material, they alone can send out a recruiting package to colleges that includes
highlights, statistics, and academic and
contact information.
“It’s amazing how quickly they can
send these packages to a coach,” Bradburn said. “They can have a big game
Friday night. And Saturday morning,
a college coach can watch the highlights.”
Hudl and BeRecruited offer Webonly support.
Jay Jackson, the driving force behind Step Your Game Up, a consulting

than the Division I schools (That
varies by sport).
Division III schools do not
offer athletic scholarships.
The idea of parents paying large sums in the name of
preparing a Division I-caliber
athlete saddens Thurman, who
raised three children to play collegiate athletics.
“You got to have two different things,” Col. Zadok
Magruder boys basketball coach
Dan Harwood said. “One is unbelievable, God-given athletic
ability. Two, if you don’t have
that unbelievable talent, you got
to have an unbelievable work
ethic.”
That doesn’t stop some parents from spending money on
the most renowned coaches and
top-notch equipment.

ﬁrm in Northern Virginia, said the recruiting journey necessitates a handson service.
“A lot of times, kids end up going
through a website, but not a real faceto-face person and I want to be there
for them,” he said. “I try to tell kids
what to improve on or tell kids they’re
not a Division I player. I’ll be honest.”
He was a basketball coach for 13
years and spent another 10 as the assistant admissions director at the Flint
Hill School in Oakton, Va.
Instead of widely offering Step Your
Game Up, Jackson said, he takes about
15 athletes per recruiting cycle. There’s
a one-time charge of $500, which includes a personalized Web page, highlight video production and Jackson’s
services as an evaluator, mentor and
guide through the intense process.
“Recruiting is a cutthroat business,” he said. “People’s feelings get
hurt, especially kids and parents.”
Jackson said the personal relationship he has with clients let him pinpoint the best college programs for
each player. As an evaluator, he sometimes reaches out to coaches — or vice
versa — to put an athlete on their radar.
“A family the other week was uncomfortable with the direction they
were going and they asked me to call
up another program and see how
things developed,” Jackson said. “We
had a great conversation and the kid is
going to go there.”
Knight had one piece of advice for
student-athletes:
“Do your work yourself. Use the
services as another tool to get you
where you want to go, not as the main
tool.”

ing the same types of movements, which
develops motor patterns and you grow
and get stronger on one side, in one direction. Imbalance leads to more issues,”
King said.
Another factor in the injury epidemic is underreporting, Levine said.
The pressure to be the best, to not show
vulnerability, to not “waste” parents’
money, prevents many young athletes
from admitting they are in pain, Hakopian said. That pattern continues into
high school.
Coaches must be in tune with their
athletes, Hakopian added. It is typically
obvious when an athlete is compensating for pain.
Seeking medical attention is imperative, Levine said.
While there are some extreme cases
where surgery is necessary, the majority of the children he sees can be treated
without an operation. Most of these
injuries are preventable and can be
avoided by taking proper precautions.
STOP is geared toward guiding
parents, coaches and athletes on how
to safely participate in athletics. It provides information on age-appropriate
training regimens.
A more realistic view of college athletics also might help.
“I don’t think people realize how limited those scholarships are,” Hakopian
said. “I’m getting you ready to play soccer in college if you want to play soccer
in college. There is a vast difference between playing soccer in college vs. getting
money for soccer in college. I think a lot
of people are getting into it for the wrong
reasons.
“Straight from the mouth of all [my]
players who have ever gone on to play
college soccer, it makes the transition
to college much easier. You’re going
into this world of the unknown and no
matter how much you think you know,
soccer provides a sort of security blanket. That’s what I tell people. If you’re
passionate about the sport and you love
playing it, those are the reasons why
you should play.”
jbeekman@gazette.net

For some, money is the
equalizer. Parents paying for
equipment, camps, coaches,
teams, ice time or green fees,
and travel expenses might
struggle to make ends meet.
Some think the best way to win
a scholarship is to attend a college coach’s camp, and have
the coach see and work with the
child.
“It’s haves and have-nots,”
Paint Branch ﬁeld hockey coach
Dan Feher said. “Which has always been the case, which we’ve
tried in the county to avoid in
certain cases. Some places have
money; some places don’t.”
“Haves” might pay for an
unguaranteed future of their
children’s athletic careers.
“Have-nots” might not be able
to afford decent equipment

— a complete golf bag can run
around $1,000 — without help.
The ramiﬁcations are both
emotional and ﬁnancial.
“I’d say about half of my
kids are members at country
clubs and a few have had swing
coaches,” Thomas S. Wootton
golf coach Paul Williams said.
“You’re talking thousands and
thousands of dollars. These parents and kids are investing loads
and loads of time and money and
I can’t put an exact number on it,
but the expenses are massive.”
He added: “The players come to me knowing how
to play. They’ve had swing
coaches, they’ve had lessons,
they’ve played before, and that’s
money.”
Each sport has its own costs.
It costs more to play golf and

SOURCE: DICK’S SPORTING GOODS

hockey, because of the green
fees and ice time, than it does to
run track, which requires only a
pair of shoes.
Asked about certain athletes
not having the liberty to choose
which sport they want to play
due to financial constraints,
Thurman said, “Absolutely.
There’s absolutely no question
about it. I always thought, ‘Wow,
I wish I could go to the inner city
with a grant and get all these
athletes into different sports.’”
On the idea of spending
money in hopes of getting an
athletic scholarship, Thurman said: “Is it worth the extra
money? I don’t know. It’s all
about trying to find the right
balance.”
tmewhirter@gazette.net

The Gazette
OUROPINIONS

Forum

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

|

Page A-12

Pet project
Montgomery County opens its
new Animal Services and Adoption Center in Derwood on Nov.
1, meaning a government function that had been provided by
the volunteers at the Montgomery
County Humane Society will now
fall squarely on the county government’s shoulders.
The Humane Society spent
$1.6 million a year running the
well-worn facility on Rothgeb
Drive, but as
Police Chief
COUNTY
Thomas
NEEDS TO Manger told
a County
CHANGE
Council
DOG
committee
AND CAT
last week,
LICENSING the new
$20 million
county center will cost more to
run. (The police department oversees animal control services.)
One way to bolster the budget
would be to seek out grant funds
more aggressively. He also mentioned the county could revamp
pet licensing. Here, there’s plenty
of room for improvement.
A few numbers: There are
an estimated 400,000 pets in the
county. The cost of an annual license for a cat or dog that has been
spayed or neutered is $12 and $25
for an unaltered pet. The licensing
compliance rate is 7 percent. The
county collects $400,000 a year in
license fees.
There will always be scofﬂaws,
but 7 percent is abysmal. It should
be a high priority of the new shelter director to see the compliance
rate increase, and fast. A licensed
dog or cat ensures that one more
pet is vaccinated against rabies, a
dangerous disease that can transfer
from an animal to a human being.
But if a pet license is meant to
serve as disease prevention, one
has to doubt how seriously the
county takes the job. Do pet owners know the licenses need to be
updated annually? Do cat owners
know they face the same provisions as dog owners?
Here, the Humane Society
could play a vital role in the new
animal services scheme.
Another way to improve compliance would be to make it easier
to pay. At that committee meeting,
participants discussed an online
payment system — and it’s odd
that one wasn’t created before.
And ﬁnally, an annual fee of
$12 is just too high.
Montgomery County residents
can point to any number of taxes or
fees that ought to be reduced. But
the pet tax should be ﬁrst in line.
A homeowner can see the value
of paying property taxes, however
high, when a police ofﬁcer meets
with a neighborhood watch or a
snow plow clears a street. A $12 pet
license?
Lower the fee, make it easier to
pay and remind pet owners it’s their
duty. The compliance rate will increase, and fewer tax dollars will be
needed to shelter homeless pets.
MY MARYLAND BLAIR LEE

LETTERS TOT HE EDITOR

Train deaths the result of trespassing
The letter was entitled “Train
deaths have implication for Purple
Line,” was published on July 10, and
was written by Mary Rivkin, a member
of the board of directors of the Friends
of the Capital Crescent Trail.
This is a totally false argument. The
two young men unfortunately killed in
Garrett Park last week were not “killed
by the train.” They were trespassing on
the railroad, and on the busy CSX line
that is the same as if they went out for

a stroll on Interstate 270.
In many cases people who do this
also have their music player earbuds
in, volume turned way up, and never
even hear the train coming. The railroad is not your shortcut to get somewhere. Keep off the tracks — always,
and expect a train on any track, in either direction, at any time.
What is really going on is an argument by a special interest group that
does not want a needed transit im-

provement. The Purple Line will be
separated from the trail by a fence, and
no one with any intelligence is going to
be vaulting the fence to go for a stroll
on the railroad.
Further, the Capital Crescent Trail
would not even have been there had
the old B&O Georgetown Branch had
been purchased by the government
decades ago, with the intent that the
right of way would ultimately have
been a transit line.

Wasteful defense spending hurting county
As sequestration cuts sink in,
the consensus seems to be that
they are causing little pain, even
though they have resulted in cuts
for programs in Montgomery
County such as housing assistance
and senior lunch programs, as well
as layoffs and furloughs for government workers and contractors.
This comes after years of budget
cuts necessitated by economic recession.
None of this pain would have
been necessary if Congress had
the courage to cut wasteful spending that has drawn the criticism of
both liberals and conservatives, but
there has been no action by either
side. Military spending is bloated

by pork and waste that primarily
beneﬁt a wealthy few without improving national security at all.
Publications as diverse as
Businessweek and the American
Conservative have listed areas of
military waste that could be cut.
Weapons manufacturing is rife
with corruption and overspending.
Fighter planes don’t need to cost
$200 million to $300 million apiece.
They do because contracts are
awarded to companies in districts
with inﬂuential congressmen, based
on political expediency not efﬁciency
or comparative advantage.
Other Defense Department
programs have nothing to do
with defense at all: a $100,000 De-

fense Advanced Research Projects
Agency strategy planning workshop including a session titled
“Did Jesus die for Klingons too?”
that entailed a panel debating the
implications for Christian philosophy should life be found on other
planets; a DOD and Department
of Agriculture co-produced reality
cooking show called “Grill It Safe”;
and DOD-run microbreweries.
The needs of Montgomery
County citizens are being sacrificed because Congress doesn’t
have the willpower to cut the most
bloated and unnecessary programs
that both parties have criticized as
wasteful.

Since last August, I have tried
to license ﬁve pets, initial one-year
licenses for two cats, one-year renewals for one cat and one dog
and a three-year renewal for my
younger dog.
Acknowledgement for only the
one-year dog license was returned
by MCHS and even that was mishandled. I had checked the box

The Gazette
Karen Acton,
President/Publisher

Congratulations to those responsible for creation and approval of the
development plan amendment increasing retail space to 484,000 square
feet in Cabin Branch [“Planning board
OKs Clarksburg outlet center,” July 19].
This amendment sets the stage
for Clarksburg to ﬁnally have the kind
of upscale retail that has long been

Muriel Hardin, Silver Spring

Edward Miller, Damascus

needed. It will transform the unused
Adventist property into an asset that
will re-energize our community, adding more than 1,000 jobs and over $150
million in private investment to the local economy.
Most important, it ﬁnally will allow
for implementation of a broad vision
for Clarksburg that not only incorpo-

rates a wide range of business, service
and employment opportunities, but
positions it to serve as an attractive —
and competitive — place for a wide
range of employers and a key component of the economic engine that is
driving Montgomery County and the
entire state forward.

for a new tag but no tag was sent.
I have the check images from my
bank showing that each payment
I sent was processed but I am supposed to have the piece of paper
from MCHS for each license.
I hope the changes coming in
the fall will solve the problems with
licenses.

Tim Willard, Kensington

Cabin Branch will re-energize Clarksburg community
Go to www.gazette.net/
blairlee to read “The Laura
Neuman Story,” part 2 of
his examination of the Anne
Arundel County executive.

Carleton MacDonald, Gaithersburg
The writer says he worked for a
railroad for 33 years.

Paul Layer was portrayed in a front page
article as being a hero for defeating a speed
camera ticket in county court [“Montgomery
County drops case of Damascus speed camera ticket,” July 10].
I’m sure some of us gave a silent cheer to
see someone who escaped a ﬁne, especially
for those of us who have received these tickets. However, let me present a different perspective.
First, in the article Mr. Layer never refuted his ticket on the basis of speeding.
Therefore, there was a good chance he was
speeding.
Second, the camera is along Ridge Road
which is heavily traveled and is ﬂanked by
numerous schools, residential homes and
businesses.
Third, Mr. Layer ties up the court with
his case and causes untold Montgomery
County resources to be spent.
So instead of some money going into
our county’s coffers, our judicial system languishes on bureaucratic technicalities and
thus wastes our tax money. Personally, I support speed cameras from both the safety and
revenue standpoint. And I consider the real
heroes as those who obey the laws and pay
their fair share for any transgressions.

How will pet licenses be handled?
Your article in the July 10 Gazette [“County to play larger role
in managing animal shelter”] was a
little disturbing to me as it did not
mention how pet licensing will be
handled after the change. While
the Texas ﬁrm that used to handle
that task had problems, they did a
better job than the Montgomery
County Humane Society.

There is an excellent trail from
Bethesda to Georgetown on the portion that will never be used by transit,
and the trail and the Purple Line will
be integrated on the portion from Silver Spring to Bethesda. Someone just
doesn’t want something in her backyard.

WRITE TO US
The Gazette welcomes letters on subjects of
local interest. Please limit them to 200 words.
All letters are subject to editing. Include your
name, address and daytime telephone number.
Send submissions to: The Gazette, attention
Commentary Editor, 9030 Comprint Court,
Gaithersburg, MD 20877; fax to 301-6707183; or email to opinions@gazette.net.

always thought I was born too
late,” said musician James Bazen. “ ... I thought I deﬁnitely
would have been one of those
guys in the big bands traveling
around, but that doesn’t happen so much anymore.”
While traveling big bands
may be a thing of the past,
Bazen is still managing to live out
his big band dreams today. Bazen
is the owner of Music Unlimited, a
Montgomery County-based booking
agency that schedules local bands
and DJs. He’s also the leader of the
James Bazen Big Band, a 17-piece jazz
orchestra. The band will perform at
BlackRock for the ﬁrst time Saturday.
Bazen is a graduate of Greensboro
College in North Carolina where he
earned a degree in musical performance. He then spent a year studying
jazz and commercial music at DePaul
University in Minnesota.
Bazen moved to Montgomery
County from Chicago in 1984.
“It took me a couple of
years to get the business
off the ground and make
contacts,” he said.

BLACKROCK

BOASTS

n

MONTGOMERY COUNTY
ENSEMBLE LOOKS TO
KEEP TRADITION ALIVE
WITH ITS MUSIC

BIG

band

BY CARA HEDGEPETH
STAFF WRITER

See BAND, Page A-17

James Bazen is also the owner of Music Unlimited, a booking company based in Gaithersburg.
PHOTOS FROM JAMES BAZEN BIG BAND

Piano soloist
Jon
Nakamatsu
from
California
will perform
Gershwin’s
classic
“Rhapsody
in Blue”
with the
Baltimore
Symphony
Orchestra on
Thursday at
the Music
Center at
Strathmore.
PHOTO BY SARAH
SHATZ

MUSIC

GOING WITH
GERSHWIN
n

Privately trained pianist went down
different road to forge his career

BY

VIRGINIA TERHUNE |

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

|

Page A-13

THEATER

One
singular
sensation

n

Wildwood Summer Theatre
Company in the midst of
annual production
BY

CARA HEDGEPETH
STAFF WRITER

A year after composer Marvin
Hamlisch’s death, Wildwood Summer Theatre presents one of his
most celebrated scores with their
production of “A Chorus Line,”
now in its second week at BethesdaChevy Chase High School.
“ ... This seemed commemorative,” said Mattia D’Affuso, Wildwood’s producer.
The theater company’s members range in age from 14 to 25. A
group of Walter Johnson
A CHORUS
High School
LINE
students
started the
n When: 7:30 p.m.
company in
Friday, July 26,
1965. Since
2 p.m. and 7:30
then, Wildp.m. July 27
wood
has
p r o d u c e d n Where: BethesdaChevy Chase
at least one
High School,
musical every
4301 Eastyear.
West Highway,
“Every
Bethesda
year, the pron Tickets: $20
ducer and diadults, $18
rector select
seniors, $12
a list of five
students
to six shows
and then the
n For information:
240-583-0978,
board holds
wst.org
a meeting to
choose the
shows,” said
Ben Lurye,
chairman of the board of directors.
The 65-member company includes the Wildwood board made
up of 15 young people who make decisions about everything from what
show the company will produce to
rehearsal and performance space.
It wasn’t just the anniversary of
Hamlisch’s death that led members
of Wildwood’s board to choose “A
Chorus Line” — the story of Broad-

See WILDWOOD, Page A-17

STAFF WRITER

Some musicians apply to the Juilliard
School in New York for the training they need
to become solo pianists, but Jon Nakamatsu of
California achieved the same end by using different means.
Nakamatsu didn’t go to a music conservatory, but in 1997 the privately trained pianist
won the Gold Medal at the prestigious Van
Cliburn International Piano Competition, capping his performances with Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Third
Piano Concerto.
“It changed my life overnight — I began
touring three days after that,” said Nakamatsu,
who will perform Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in
Blue” during the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s “Gershwin’s Greatest Hits” concert on
Thursday at the Music Center at Strathmore in
North Bethesda.

The Unexpected Stage Company’s presentation of Alan Bennett’s play, “The Lady in the Van,” continues to Aug. 11 at the Randolph Road Theatre
in Silver Spring. From left are Sally Anderson as Miss Shepherd, Adam Downs as Alan Bennett and Lois Sanders-DeVincent as Mam.

‘Unexpected’HELP

The Unexpected Stage production of Alan Bennett’s “The Lady in the Van” continues to
Aug. 11 at the Randolph Road Theatre in Silver Spring. Partial proceeds from Sunday’s 2 p.m.
performance will beneﬁt The Dwelling Place. Headquartered in Gaithersburg, the nonproﬁt assists low income families in Montgomery County achieve housing and ﬁnancial stability. The
performance will be followed by a post-show discussion with Dwelling Place board members,
director Christopher Goodrich and actors. Audience members are encouraged to mention The
Dwelling Place on Sunday, and half of their admission will beneﬁt the organization. Bennett’s
play was inspired by his own personal relationship with Miss Shepherd, a homeless eccentric
who moved her van into the playwright’s garden — and remained there for 15 years. For more
information, visit www.unexpectedstage.org.
PHOTOS BY SHERVIN LAINEZ

Cello, guitar and electronics duo Janel and Anthony will perform in concert on
Friday at the United Therapeutics BioWall Plaza in Silver Spring. For more
information, visit www.janelandanthony.com.

No strings attached

Avant-garde at the plaza
Sonic Circuits and Cuneiform Records will present the experimental stylings of cello, guitar and electronic duo Janel and Anthony at 6
p.m. Friday at the United Therapeutics BioWall Plaza, Cameron and
Spring Streets, Silver Spring. The avant-garde concert marks a ﬁrst
for the plaza, a new urban space recognized for its architecture and
“green” design. Guitarist Anthony Pirog and cellist Janel Leppin’s second album, “Where is Home” (Cuneiform) draws on everything from
Hindustani ragas to surf rock. Rain date is 4 p.m. July 27. For more information, visit www.janelandanthony.com.

1906816

PHOTO FROM STRATHMORE

“Lanterneers” from the puppet company Nana Projects.

Strathmore’s puppet extravaganza continues at 1 p.m. and 3
p.m. Saturday with “Nana Projects: Alonzo’s Lullaby” at CityDance
Studio Theater 405. Featuring an original score co-written and performed live by Strathmore Artist in Residence alumna ellen cherry,
Nana Projects’ haunting tale of madness, passion and intrigue was
inspired by the tragic Hagenback-Wallace Circus train wreck of
1918. Nana Projects’ style of puppetry is performed by “lanterneers”
who project hand-manipulated cutout images made of acrylic gels
onto a screen, gracefully and ingeniously using tricks of Victorian
magic lantern slide shows. The program is intended for audiences
ages 10 and older. Tickets are $8. For more information, visit www.
strathmore.org.

Traveling to Cuba has become easier in recent years.
Those who can’t get there, however, can experience the island’s
Afro-Cuban music at the annual
Latin Music and Dance Festival
on Friday in Gaithersburg.
Performing at the event for
the ﬁrst time will be the Afro Bop
Alliance, a jazz septet that won a
Latin Grammy in 2008 for its CD
“Caribbean Jazz Project.” Also
performing will be the DC Casineros, a Washington, D.C., based
troupe named after a popular
Cuban-style salsa called casino.
The free outdoor event will
take place at the City Hall Concert Pavilion. Organizers suggest
bringing a blanket or low-back
chair for lawn seating and encourage audience members to join in
and dance along with the music.
“They say in Cuba, ‘If you can
walk, you can dance,’” said DC
Casineros director Amanda Gill.
Gill, who speaks Spanish,
has been to Cuba eight times,
most recently with a group of
students from George Mason
University based in Fairfax, Va.
“We’ll probably be getting
the audience in circles and lines
so they can learn the basic footwork,” she said.
Popular dances in Cuba
include the “rueda de casino”
(“wheel of casino”), a highenergy group dance performed
by couples in a circle. A social
dance, it became popular in
Cuba during the 1950s, Gill said.
“I think Cuba has the widest range, probably the richest
range of music,” she said about
its African inﬂuences.
West African musicians use
the ﬁve-stroke clave rhythmic
pattern, and the clave is at the
center of Cuban music, she said.
“It’s found in most Cuban
dance forms,” said Gill, referring

to dances such as the rumba,
salsa, son (which pre-dated salsa),
mambo and timba, which has
become increasingly popular in
Miami.
Cuban musicians also developed a connection to musicians in New York over the
years, tapping into the rhythms
of American jazz, while AfricanAmericans traveled to Cuba in
the 1930s and 1940s.
After the Cuban Revolution
ended in 1959, the Castro regime set up free music, dance
and art schools in the country,
which enabled people who had
danced as part of their everyday
lives to also study the music behind the dances.
“It was then that popular
music got more complex,” Gill
said. “It’s never been considered
‘low’ art, because it’s become so
sophisticated.”
Joe McCarthy, percussionist and leader of the Afro Bop
Alliance, said Afro-Cuban music has a “rhythmic depth” that
makes it “some of the hippest
music” out there.
McCarthy teaches music at
George Mason University and
at Georgetown University in the
District.
Currently leader of the Naval

PHOTO BY YOAV MAGID PHOTOGRAPHY

The Casineros, who perform Afro-Cuban dances, will perform at the Latin Music and Dance Festival in Gaithersburg on Friday, July 26. From left are Laura
Dalemarre, Adrian Valdivia, Alison Blank, Amanda Gill, Cedric Teamer and Margaret Villalonga. Kneeling are Jahaira Vanegas and William Sanchez.
Academy jazz ensemble, McCarthy said he ﬁrst heard Afro-Cuban
music in college in Connecticut
and later learned more about it
from musicians in New York.
“It’s been a profound impact
that goes both ways,” said McCarthy about the cross-cultural
links between Cuba and the U.S.
“American and Cuban musicians have their strengths and
they rub off on one another,” he
said.
Traditionally Cuban musi-

cians learned music by watching
and listening to others.
“The street training gave
them a reaction time and listening skills that were stronger than [conservatory trained
musicians in the U.S.],” he
said. “The Americans could
read music well, but they can’t
improvise as well.”
McCarthy said the Afro Bop
Alliance typically plays jazz
made more for listening than
dancing but that it is reworking

some of its music for dances like
the mambo and cha-cha for the
Gaithersburg concert.
Even so, he said the band,
with its two saxophones, trumpet,
bass, drums and recently added

steel pan, is not likely to sound
like a typical Latin dance band.
“It’s deﬁnitely not your standard type of salsa,” he said.
vterhune@gazette.net

What do Broadway star
Sutton Foster, country music
legend Travis Tritt, blue-collar
comedy alum Bill Engvall, actress Olympia Dukakis and THE
Michael Bolton have in common? They’re all scheduled to
perform this season at Strathmore.
Tickets went on sale to the
public July 18 for the 2013-2014
season at Strathmore.
Shelley Brown, artistic director at Strathmore, said it’s exciting to see the venue come into
its own.
“I think that we really are
hitting our stride,” Brown said.
“We’re ﬁnding out what we do
well and we’re doing more of
it. I think, in the area of Broadway, Sutton Foster I think is one
of the biggest names out there
who’s doing performances.
We’re delighted to have her featured here in the fall. Also Diane
Reeves, who’s coming out with
a big, new album. It’s nice that
we’ve become a venue with the
reputation that sometimes these
artists are seeking us out, in the
case of these two.
Going into planning with a
sense of balance was paramount
for Brown. It was important to
everyone at Strathmore to have
the right mix of dancers, singers
and performers.

2013-2014 SEASON
AT STRATHMORE
n Tickets are on sale now. For
a complete schedule, and
to purchase tickets, visit
strathmore.org. Call the box
ofﬁce at 301-581-5100.

“When I start to present – or
to outline – a season, we do try
to have a balance both in terms
of the dates throughout the year
from September through June
and we do try to have a balance of performances from different constituencies,” Brown
said. “This year there was a big
change. We did a big thematic
festival in the summer – that’s
going on right now – it’s called
‘Puppets Take Strathmore.’ The
big thematic events in years past
have happened in the Music
Center or in the Mansion. This
one is taking place in the new
blackbox theater … in the Education Center.”
According to Brown, the
puppets really started the new
season for Strathmore.
“It’s a marvelous way to
begin a season because it’s creative, it’s interdisciplinary, it’s
surprising, it’s artistic and some
of it’s a little naughty with little
adult puppets,” Brown said. “So
I’m really happy with how that
sets the tone for the season.”
With dance groups popping
up regionally, Brown said it was
important to try to get performers local dancers could come
and see.

“We try to have dance in every season,” Brown said. “We’ve
got ‘Forever Tango’ coming
up, we’ve got Pilobolus here in
February, which I’m delighted
because I’ve been trying to get
Pilobolus here since we first
opened. … I’m working really
hard to keep dance on the stage
here. ... I think that we have
a growing market for dance
in Montgomery County with
[American Dance Institute]’s
great success and with CityDance’s school growing like
crazy, I want to have product for
them to come see at the Music
Center.”
Also featured in the growth
of the season is the inclusion of
more country acts. Again, the
dynamic of the surrounding
area played a big part.
“This year we do have more
country music,” Brown said.
“I’m really trying to move into
that area because I think, well,
number one, because of WMZQ
right here, we have a great country radio station. We don’t have
that with all formats of music,
but we have a good way to speak
to audiences who like that music. We also have a whole new
group of neighbors at the NIH
at the Walter Reed Center and
country music is one that ... age
group likes. So I’m trying to adjust our concerts in response to
changes going on in our community.”
Big name acts aside, there
are plenty of other events and
acts coming to Strathmore that
audiences will ﬁnd intriguing.

PHOTOS FROM STRATHMORE

Vocalist Michael Bolton will perform in concert on March 2 as part of Strathmore’s highly-anticipated 2013-14 season.
Strathmore continues its artists-in-residence program and
a comic book exhibit will make
its way there in mid-April. For
Brown, that’s just the tip of the
iceberg.
“You know, the Mansion at
Strathmore, we have a 100-seat
music room,” Brown said. “This
year, we have created a new cabaret series and we have Nellie
McKay coming and others. But
Nellie, I think, is one of the just
brightest rising stars in music.
She has performed in the Music Center before and some 100
lucky people are going to get to
see her there. So that’s one that I
think is quite wonderful.
“The other one is we’re
working on a residency program with Jayme Stone and his
Lomax Project. Alan Lomax was
an important recorder of music
for the Smithsonian and went
all over the country to record
sounds and music and this will

Broadway star Sutton Foster will perform in concert on Oct. 12 at Strathmore.
be looking at that archive, which
is available in the public domain
to use. We’ll be looking at what’s
there and using that as a teaching tool. [Stone] will be working
with Julian Lage, who’s amazing,
and Bruce Molsky, who’s from
the area and brilliant, and Margaret Glaspy. … This is giving us

an opportunity to present fantastic concerts but also do some
school outreach, some education stuff, education events in
conjunction with the concerts
that I think will have some real
impact.”
wfranklin@gazette.net

‘The Conjuring’: Haunting, in all the best ways
BY

MICHAEL PHILLIPS

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

AT THE MOVIES

Haunted house movies only
work if the people in the house
are worth scaring. Sounds stupid, but it’s true, although let’s
be honest: Real estate is inherently frightening. You put all
that money in and only Satan
knows if it’ll turn out to be a decent investment, or if you’ll be
able to afford what it takes to repair any undisclosed matters of
basement seepage. The quirks
and creaks of an old house are
always good for gallows humor
or a cold shot of dread. As I write

this the fridge in our new/old
residence is softly moaning like
a distant foghorn. Is it the way
the appliance sits on a slightly
askew kitchen floor? Is it demonic?
When a really good new
horror ﬁlm comes out — something more about creative intelligence than executing the next
grisly kill shot — it’s something
of a miracle in this eviscerating post-“Saw” era. Old-school
and supremely conﬁdent in its

attack, “The Conjuring” is this
year’s miracle — an “Amityville
Horror” for a new century (and
a far better movie than that 1979
hit), yet ﬁrmly rooted, without
being slavish or self-conscious,
in the visual language of 1970s
ﬁlmmaking.
Also like “The Amityville
Horror,” “The Conjuring” derives from an alleged true-life
haunting, this one in rural
Rhode Island, at an old house
where terrible things happened
and are happening still. The
relative restraint of “The Conjuring” is a surprise given that the
director, James Wan, made the

ﬁrst of the “Saw” ﬁlms. A more
apt reference point is Wan’s recent, slow-simmer horror outing “Insidious,” which, like “The
Conjuring,” took its time in establishing the ground rules.
The script by Chad Hayes
and Carey W. Hayes blends the
tales of two families under extreme duress. Demonologists Ed
and Lorraine Warren, the reallife ghost hunters played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga,
investigate the strange goingson in the riverside farmhouse
owned by a family of seven (two
parents, ﬁve daughters) headed
by Roger (Ron Livingston) and
Carolyn (Lili Taylor). Warning signs and troubling details
abound, but subtly, in the opening sequences. The family dog
won’t go inside. The clocks stop
every night at 3:07 a.m. Unexplained bruises appear on the
mother’s body, and one of the
daughters complains of someone tugging at her feet in bed.
Then the ghost of a long-dead
child appears to one of the girls
in a mirror. The miserably outof-tune piano found in the cellar
plays … itself.
Before all that, though,
“The Conjuring” begins with a

(From left) John Brotherton as Brad, Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren,
Patrick Wilson as as Ed Warren and Ron Livingston as Roger Perron in New
Line Cinema’s supernatural thriller “The Conjuring,” a Warner Bros. Pictures
release.
bait-and-switch and an entirely
different story set three years
earlier, that of a devil doll in 1968
(the year of “Rosemary’s Baby”!)
terrorizing nurses in Manhattan.
The doll ends up in the possession of the paranormal investigators played by Wilson and
Farmiga. They have a young
daughter of their own, who’s no
less vulnerable to demons and
such than the Rhode Island girls
living by the river.
Shooting digitally but with
great attention to practical and
postproduction lighting and
color effects, Wan and his cinematographer, John R. Leonetti,
keep the “gotchas!” coming.
Near the end, when the full-on
possession is underway, “The
Conjuring” starts to feel more
familiar, and there’s less downtime between thrills. (Wan’s
technique grows more obviously
hysterical as the characters do.)
Wilson, a solid actor, brings to

the material a stalwart leadingman aura that’s more serviceable than compelling on its own.
But the movie belongs to the
women, for once, and “The Conjuring” doesn’t exploit or mangle
the female characters in the usual
ways. Farmiga, playing a true believer, makes every spectral sighting and human response matter;
Taylor is equally ﬁne, and when
she’s playing a “hide-and-clap”
blindfold game with her girls,
she’s like a kid herself, about to
get the jolt of her life.
Wan shoots “The Conjuring”
like a Robert Altman ﬁlm, slipsliding around the interior or the
exterior of the old dark house in
a series of slow zooms and gratifyingly complex extended takes.
Might this movie actually be too
good, in a slightly square way,
to ﬁnd the audience it deserves
among under-20-somethings?
Maybe. Maybe not. I hope not.

THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

Page A-17

Living phat at Wheaton’s Mi La Cay Noodles and Grill

Mi La Cay is Wheaton’s newest
destination for authentic Vietnamese
noodle and grilled dishes, and that can
be a daunting proposition considering
the population density of pho and noodle restaurants in the neighborhood.
Located on University Boulevard near
the intersection with Georgia Avenue,
Mi La Cay is the expanded operation of
what was until recently a tiny little noodle shop call Song Phat, located in a few
square feet behind the perfectly charming Huang Phat market on Fern Street.
In addition to expanding the size of
the dining room, the menu has grown
signiﬁcantly without diminishing the
quality, and ample parking makes Mi
La Cay far more accessible.

DINING REVIEW
BRIAN PATTERSON
The space, formerly the venerable
Lucia’s Delicatessen, is now a vast and
clean restaurant space. Tables are well
stocked with a tidy caddy of condiments. There is a vestibule at the front
door, which matters when it comes to
containing the outside elements from
the dining room.
Come for the beef in grape leaves.
They are moist and rich with just
the right singe of char on the briny
grape leaf. And the dipping sauce is
modestly sweet, sour and salty. Stay
for the duck in broth. It’s an elegant,
deeply ﬂavored consommé piled with
hunks of duck roasted on the bone,
served with typical pho garnishes including fresh bean sprouts, cilantro,

lime and sliced jalapenos.
Seafood soup also begins with a
nice clean broth loaded with shrimp,
scallops, squid and mussels. The clean,
clear broth is rich in ﬂavor, and can reasonably tolerate the addition of a couple
of chilies at the table. Spicy beef soup
with peanuts and noodles is thick and
viscous in texture and it glows with the
iridescence of red chilies. It satisﬁes in
a teary kind of way. Their superb rendition of classic pho with the usual array
of off-beat cuts of beef is reasonably
priced at $6.95 for small, and $7.95 for
large.
Spring rolls contain a nice mixture of vegetables and meat in a fairly
greaseless fried wrapper and they are
served with a piquant sweet and sour
marinated cabbage salad. Grilled lemongrass chicken has that ﬂoral, tropical,
citrusy ﬂavor of lemongrass that has an
afﬁnity for the slight bitterness from be-

GREG DOHLER/THE GAZETTE

Main dishes at Mi La Cay in Wheaton include (clockwise from bottom left) grilled pork chops; crispy fried chicken with tomato rice; barbecued pork, squid, shrimp, ﬁsh balls and ﬁsh cakes with pork broth; strawberry-mango smoothie and stir-fried noodles with chicken, shrimp,
ﬁsh cakes, bean sprouts and onions.
ing touched by ﬂames. The noodles and
straightforward salad make this simple
yet satisfying. I was looking forward to a
house breadstick that goes with some of

the soups, but they ran out of those they
day I was there.
In any incarnation, Mi La Cay enjoys a loyal following. On one Sunday,

Mi La Cay was packed, yet food came
out in a timely manner and the noise
level did not leave us straining to converse.

WILDWOOD

GERSHWIN

way dancers auditioning for a spot in a
musical.
“We haven’t done a dance show in the
last few years,” D’Affusso said. “ ... This
would be a good opportunity to give student dancers an opportunity to audition
for us ...”
Wildwood Theatre Company is all
about providing opportunity, whether it’s
for young actors looking for a role, singers
hoping to join the chorus or a technician
looking to gain some hands-on experience behind the scenes.
“We try to take an array of people who
are interested ... and we provide them
with a way to ... get their feet wet with
various aspects of theater,” said D’Affuso.
“Everyone gets to focus on whatever
they’re interested in and just gain more
experience with that.”
D’Affuso joined the theater company
in the summer of 2009 as a member of the
cast, while he was a student at Thomas S.
Wootton High School. The next summer
he became the group’s director of public
relations.
“My major was music but I decided
to get involved in the PR side and see that
part of the theater,” said D’Affuso, who
graduated in May from James Madison
University.
D’Affuso went on to join the board of
directors and work as an associate producer before becoming producer this
summer.
Actress Katherine Worley said she too
has explored more than one area of the
theater business during her three summers with Wildwood.
“It’s a whole group effort so everyone
is encouraged to work on the tech side of
things,” Worley said.
Though she appreciates Wildwood’s
collaborative nature now, Worley said she
was apprehensive when she ﬁrst heard
about the theater company.
“I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect
because I had always worked with adult
directors,” Worley said. “I was shocked by
how professional everyone seems but at
the same time, how much of a learning
experience it is.”
A graduate of Quince Orchard High
School, Worley will start her senior year
at Salisbury University in the fall. Though
performing is her ﬁrst love, Worley said
Wildwood wouldn’t function if members
didn’t contribute in multiple areas.
“Everyone’s individual skills really
do come together in putting together a
company,” Worley said. “It’s really neat
to see.”

On Friday, Nakamatsu and
the BSO will perform the same
concert at the Myerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore. The
BSO also will present music
from Gershwin’s “An American
In Paris” at both venues.
Composed in 1924, “Rhapsody in Blue” established Gershwin as a serious composer, but
the piece for solo pianist and jazz
ensemble has never been easy to
pigeonhole.
“It’s not jazz, it’s not classical, it’s not pop — it’s just Gershwin,” said Nakamatsu, adding
that there’s no disagreement
about its popularity among musicians and audiences.
“It’s fun to play, because of
the interplay between the piano
and the orchestra, and it’s immediately appealing to everybody,”
he said.
A San Jose native, Nakamatsu was 4 years old when he
saw a piano for the ﬁrst time at
his preschool, knowing right
away that he wanted to learn
how to play it.
“The teacher pressed these
[keys], and this magical sound
came out that attracted me,” said
Nakamatsu, who started lessons
when he was 6.
“I had private teachers who
[referred me] to others for musical theory and background — it
was like being home-schooled,”
he said about the focus and intensity of his years of classical
music training.
At the same time, he was
also able to pursue his academic
interests, including a love of languages and grammar, focusing
on German because so many
of the great piano works are by
German-speaking composers
such as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart
and Schubert.
“I thought it would help with
travel, and I could study the same
materials and the same books that
Beethoven did,” he said.
Nakamatsu earned a bachelor’s degree in German Studies
from Stanford University in 1991
and a master’s in education from
Stanford the following year.
He also taught German at a
high school in Mountain View,

Continued from Page A-13

Continued from Page A-13

BAND

Continued from Page A-13
By 1986, Bazen was heading
The Music Unlimited Big Band,
a smaller ensemble that plays
commercial jazz. The James
Bazen Big Band performs more
traditional swing and jazz orchestra, featuring the work of
Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington. The Music Unlimited Band
is still active but plays mostly at
private events.
“ ... The Music Unlimited
Band is the commercial version
of the James Bazen Big Band,”
Bazen said. “It’s the same players but the repertoire is different.”
The James Bazen Big Band
got its start at a small, now de-

PHOTO FROM WILDWOOD SUMMER THEATRE

The Wildwood Summer Theatre cast rehearses the closing number of “A Chorus Line.”
In “A Chorus Line,” Worley plays Kristine, a character she said is a far cry from
other roles she’s played and her own personality.
“It’s been very, very different from
anything I’ve done,” Worley said. “I typically play the more provocative role.”
Perhaps the biggest difference between Worley and Kristine is their musical
abilities. Kristine is supposed to be tone
deaf while Worley has been playing the
piano and singing since a young age.
While Worley still has a few years of
eligibility left, “A Chorus Line” will be
Lurye’s ﬁnal show with Wildwood. Now

funct, pizza place in Rockville
called Paisano’s.
“We had a steady gig there on
Wednesday nights for 10 years,
maybe,” Bazen said. “So that’s
how the band got developed and
got to be known, because people
would come in and it was often
standing room only.”
The gig was so integral in
helping the band get off its feet
that they named their second
album, “Wednesday Night Pizza
Band.”
“ ... That’s what we were,”
Bazen said. “We were playing in
this pizza joint on Wednesday
night.”
Bazen has four other recordings under his name; “Tonight is
Mine,” “Merry Christmas Take
One, “James Bazen Quintet” and
“USA Canteen,” a tribute to the

25, Lurye has been a member of Wildwood since 2006. He studied music at the
University of Maryland and now works as
a professional actor, appearing in shows
at local theater companies in the Washington, D.C., area. He said his experience
with Wildwood has helped him tremendously in his career.
“ ... It has given me incredible insight
as to how things work,” Lurye said. “Even
though I won’t continue to pursue the business side of things, it’s certainly an experience that will sit with me my entire life.”
chedgepeth@gazette.net

Andrews Sisters. All are available on Amazon, CD Baby and
Bazen’s website.
After Paisano’s closed, the
James Bazen Big Band moved
on to regular gigs at Felicita’s
in downtown Rockville and Ching’s in Sterling, Va.
More recently, the band has
started playing more regularly
at Montgomery County venues
and events, including Taste of
Bethesda, Blues Alley and most
recently, the Bethesda Blues
and Jazz Supper Club. In fact,
Music Unlimited is responsible
for booking all local bands that
perform at the club.
Bazen sees the club as an
opportunity to bolster the jazz
and swing scene in Montgomery
County. He feels so passionately
about the genre of music that

he’s become an advisor on the
county executive’s task force on
nighttime economy.
“We need a place that plays
jazz badly in Montgomery
County,” Bazen said. “What
they’re trying to do is trying to
keep people in Montgomery
County for their nightlife instead
of leaving for U Street or somewhere else in D.C. We’re going over some ideas about how
to keep people here and them
spending their money here and
going to clubs like Bethesda
Blues and Jazz.”
One of the ways to keep big
band and jazz music alive locally is to broaden its audience.
Bazen said he and his band try
to do that by incorporating different styles of music into traditional swing and jazz.

“ ... There are so many styles
and inﬂuences we play on any
given day, even if somebody
doesn’t like what they’re hearing for this tune, they’re going to
like the next tune because it’s so
different,” Bazen said.
Bazen hopes his vocalist

Calif., while continuing to enter
musical competitions, not yet sure
he could chart a successful career
for himself as a solo pianist.
“The Van Cliburn visibility
is so enormous that it gives you
the push that you need to start
something,” said Nakamatsu,
who quit his teaching job and
has been touring the world ever
since.
“There’s not just one way to
do something,” he said. “There’s
so much about experience that
matters. It’s not so much about
the paper, although it helps.”
On the road for most of the
year in the U.S., Europe and Asia,
Nakamatsu continues to make
good use of his musical skills
while also employing the social
skills he learned as a teacher.
“Fifty years ago, you could
hop from hall to hall and play,
but today you need to do more
than that,” he said. “You might
have to teach a master class, or
talk to the press or go a reception. You’re expected to know
all that — music is just a part of
what you do.”
Meanwhile, Nakamatsu has
found time to release CDs, including a recent all-Gershwin
album with conductor Jeff Tyzig
and the Rochester Philharmonic
featuring “Rhapsody in Blue”
and “Concerto in F.”
He also records with clarinetist Jon Manasse, with whom
he serves as co-artistic director
of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival. The duo released its
ﬁrst CD in 2008 called “Brahms
Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano,”
followed in 2010 by “American
Music for Clarinet and Piano”
and “Brahms Quintets” in 2012.
During Nakamatsu’s years
of performing, the Internet has
made it easy for the public to access musical performances from
all over the world without leaving the house.
But he said he doesn’t think
the experience of listening to live
music will not be going away any
time soon.
“There’s something about
hearing an instrument right
in the same room,” he said.
“There’s an excitement and energy you can’t replicate.”
vterhune@gazette.net
at Saturday’s performance will
help draw some of the younger
audiences.
“Our singer is my daughter,”
Bazen said of 18-year-old Jamie.
“ ... Of course she grew up in my
house so she likes jazz and all of
that stuff and she has inﬂuenced
her friends and they all come out
to hear me and they seem to like
it.”
Bazen said the big-band
sound is one that he thinks is
capable of transcending generations.
“I think it’s just the novelty
and the beauty of the sound,”
he said. “The uniqueness of the
band appeals to a whole bunch
of different people.”
chedgepeth@gazette.net

Page A-18

THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

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DAMASCUS | GAITHERSBURG | GERMANTOWN

www.gazette.net | Wednesday, July 24, 2013 | Page B-1

Admire the
Thunder, but
be yourself
n

Coaches agree they must guard
against youngsters’ emulation
of professional athletes
BY JENNIFER BEEKMAN
STAFF WRITER

Every young athlete has that moment when
he turns his shoulders and runs backward at the
perfect diagonal to steal a base hit with a miraculous backhanded grab. Just for that second, they
know what it feels like to be the New York Yankees’ Derek Jeter.
Or that moment when he speeds to his right
and with no chance at reaching an opponent’s
shot slides toward the ball and slaps a squashshot style slice forehand for a cross-court winner just like the world’s top-ranked men’s tennis
player, Novak Djokovic.
“I’ll even draw on my own experience. All
the time [as a kid] we’d play pick up basketball
and we’d be counting down, ‘Magic Johnson for
the NBA championship. Larry Byrd for the NBA
championship,’” ninth-year Northwest High
School softball coach Kevin Corpuz said.
Watching sports can beneﬁt young athletes in
many ways. Coaches agree the pros set great examples in work ethic, intensity and overall knowledge and strategy in their respective sports.

See YOURSELF, Page B-2

BY

NICK CAMMAROTA

W

STAFF WRITER

up (and sometimes down) lengthy ﬂights of
stairs. The Empire State Building, the Willis
Tower and the U.S. Bank Tower are all skyscrapers in which competitive stair climbers
race to the top in an all-out display of strength,
balance and wild desire.
“I know a lot of very good athletes who
won’t go near this, they’re terriﬁed of it,” said
Karlin, who lives in Bethesda and works as an entrepreneur in the
biotechnology and Internet ﬁelds.
Karlin specializes in sprint-distance climbs that take the top
performers anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes to complete depending on the course.
In April 2012, after failing to complete the course in 2011, Karlin became the ﬁrst American to ﬁnish the Mount Everest Stair
Marathon in Radebeul, Germany. The climbers have 24 hours

Jewish Day School
graduate achieves new
heights in unique sport
of stair climbing
n

hen Michael Karlin ran track
for Charles E. Smith Jewish
Day School, he wasn’t — as
he put it — any good.
A young Karlin, now 41
with a lanky and seemingly-unathletic build,
ran a mile in six-plus minutes and was fairly
discouraged by the entire concept of racing competitively.
“I got lapped on the mile,” Karlin said. “I had recollections
that I never wanted to do this stuff again. Especially when you’re
young to get killed like that, it’s never fun.”
Roughly 23 years later, not only can Karlin run the mile nearly
a minute faster than he did in high school, but he’s ranked 50th in
the world in the remarkably demanding sport of stair climbing.
Stair climbing features sprint and marathon-distance races

See STEP, Page B-2

PHOTO FROM ANDOR SCHLEGEL

Michael Karlin, 41, competes in the Mount Everest Stair Marathon in Radebeul (Dresden), Germany in April 2012. The Everest Marathon is the longest endurance
stair event in the world, where athletes have only 24 hours to climb up and down the equivalent distance from sea level to the summit of Mount Everest, while
covering the horizontal distance of two marathons across.

Good Counsel’s new basketball coach has history of success
Churchwell hopes to lead
Falcons to the top of the WCAC
n

BY

TRAVIS MEWHIRTER
STAFF WRITER

It’s easy to see why Robert Churchwell’s resume jumped out among the
60-plus applications for the vacant Our
Lady of Good Counsel boys basketball
coaching position, which became available after Blair Mills resigned.
As a graduate from Gonzaga College High, he has the local roots. As a
standout at Georgetown University
from 1990-1994, he earned a spot on the
Big East All-Rookie Team, started 128
consecutive games and ﬁnished 18th in

all-time scoring at the school and 15th
in rebounding. As a former NBA player
with Golden State and eight years playing professionally overseas, respect
from his players likely won’t be an issue.
“I think my experience as a player,
as a [Washington Catholic Athletic Conference] student-athlete, my experience
at the professional level, my experience
coaching and teaching — they obviously
thought I was the right guy for the position,” Churchwell said. “The ﬁrst step is
just coming in, gathering in all the information I can gather, reaching out to all
the families I can, let them know who I
am and what I am trying to do here.”
Mills said he resigned in May to fo

See COACH, Page B-2

PHOTO FROM ROBERT CHURCHWELL

First-year Our Lady of Good Counsel High Schoool boys basketball
coach Robert Churchwell.

OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER

Capitol Heights native and Montrose Christian graduate Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder can do
things most basketball players, especially young ones,
can’t.

Einstein running
back returns for
rare ﬁfth year
n

Titans’ star led county
in rushing last fall
BY JORDAN

COYNE

SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE

During the 2012 season, rising ﬁfth-year senior running back Khalil Wilson led Montgomery
County in rushing at Albert Einstein High School
with 1,567 yards and 12 touchdowns. This fall,
he is aiming to repeat the feat, but this time, he
wants to surpass 2,000 yards.
“Personally, I want to be the best I can be,” he
said during one of the team’s summer workouts
on Thursday.
Wilson, who attended Charles H. Flowers
High (Prince George’s County) as a true freshman, began playing football after meeting Einstein coach Jermaine Howell during the winter of
2011. Last fall, he suited up and proved to play a
vital role for the Titans.
“I was granted a ﬁfth year by [Principal Jim]
Fernandez himself,” said Wilson. “We had a contract that was on the table ... I had to step up to the
plate and I managed to do it ... through hard work
in the classroom.”
Wilson and Howell declined to discuss the
speciﬁc details of the contract. “[The contract]
was about him proving [that he could play] to

See EINSTEIN, Page B-2

THE GAZETTE

Page B-2

COACH

Continued from Page B-1
cus on his family, including a
new child he and his wife are
expecting.
“It was just the right time
for me and my wife,” said Mills
at the beginning of June, who
added he will continue to teach
social studies at the school in
the fall. “I’ve been there quite a
while. I love working there, but
just with us expecting a baby
... and the demands and rigors
of coaching in the WCAC, and
teach a full course load, it’s a lot.
It’s a hard decision to make, but
when I compare my family and
coaching, it’s unfair to my wife
and child if I’m never home.”
Along with Mills, ﬁve players
transferred out of the program,
most notably leading scorer
Byron Hawkins (18.1 points per
game) and rising sophomore Anthony Cowan, the team’s third
leading scorer (8.8). The personnel losses present Churchwell
with a pressing issue: Finding
enough bodies to ﬁll the voids.
In addition, the new coach will

see plenty of Cowan next season
when the Falcons play St. John’s
College High, a favorite alongside Bishop O’Connell and Paul
VI to capture the WCAC crown.
“I really can’t worry about
those ﬁve spots that were vacated,” Churchwell said. “I got
to focus on the young men that
are still there. I deﬁnitely have
a plan. I expect to win and obviously you can expect a lot of
things but you have to put in the
time and work to get there.”
Success is something that
Churchwell has had little issue in attaining and sustaining
throughout his career as both a
coach and player. Last season,
he coached Benedictine to a
31-4 record and a VISAA Division I state title, beating out
WCAC champ O’Connell for the
trophy. Preceding his one season at Benedictine in Richmond,
Va., Churchwell coached for six
years at Harrison High in Georgia. Most impressive, however,
may have been his 3-1 record
against WCAC opponents this
past season, which included
wins over O’Connell, DeMatha
and Bishop Ireton.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

STEP

Continued from Page B-1

PHOTOS FROM ROBERT CHURCHWELL

First-year Our Lady of Good Counsel High Schoool boys basketball coach
Robert Churchwell.
“It’s very exciting, obviously,
coming back to the WCAC, it’s
very exciting,” Churchwell said.
“I’m very familiar with the talent
there.”
One school he is extra familiar with the talent in is Gonzaga,
his alma mater turned conference rival. Though the Eagles
have lost one of the region’s top

talents in 6-foot-6 small forward
Kris Jenkins, they’re never one to
sleep on.
“I graduated from there so
I’m always going to be an Eagle,”
Churchwell said with a laugh.
“But I’m all in as a Falcon right
now.”
tmewhirter@gazette.net

to ﬁnish a course that requires
100 laps on a 397-step staircase
(up and down), which happens
to be equivalent to the vertical distance from sea level to
the summit of Mount Everest.
And back. The course, which
is comprised of 85 percent
stairs and 15 percent hills, also
is equivalent to the horizontal
distance of two full marathons.
Karlin conquered the
39,700 steps, while listening
to a collection of 1980s rock
music, in 23 hours, 20 minutes
and 45 seconds.
During this successful second attempt at the challenge
— around the lap where Karlin
cramped in 2011 (he retired

your muscles make,” Karlin
said. “I do lose time. You feel it.
On the ﬂip side, the fact that I
can compete at the global level
and have a world ranking, I’m
proud of myself for that.”
So how did Karlin discover
stair climbing in the ﬁrst place?
“I was going to the gym
and working out and I noticed I
was very good at the step mill,”
Karlin said. “I started working
with a terriﬁc personal trainer
and the combination of the
two was great.”
Karlin began researching
races and entered himself into
an Empire State Building race
in 2005. His admiration for the
sport grew from there. Karlin
said he competes in six to 10
races per year, which usually
are stacked during the colder
months, and he’s sore for two

“I was like, ‘I love it, but if I don’t ﬁnish,
I’ll have to come back and do this crap
again.’ You make fun of yourself and
you’re like, ‘How stupid can this be?’

EINSTEIN

Continued from Page B-1
himself,” Howell said.
Wilson has certainly already proved
himself to his coach and Howell expects
him to again be a key part of the Titans’
squad both on and off the ﬁeld.
“Frankly, we need our best players on
the ﬁeld,” he said. “Khalil is a student of the
game, watching a lot of ﬁlm of other players in the county, college level, and professional players ... learning what he can and
cannot do.”
Howell also expects Wilson to become
more of a vocal leader on a quiet team. The
Titans ﬁnished 6-4 last fall, their best record in 12 years, according to Howell.
“He’s never been intimidated by another team. He’s a competitor, and it’ll
start to trickle down to our younger players,” Howell said. “If it becomes contagious, we’re expecting some success out of
our players.”
Howell said the team’s goal for the upcoming season is to make it to the Class 3A
West Region.
Wilson, meanwhile, is looking to play
at the next level at either a junior college or
a four-year institution.
“Lackawanna is deﬁnitely a good possibility,” he said. “I liked the way it reminded
me of Einstein, how they’re trying to turn
the program around.”
Howell said he is conﬁdent that Wilson
will not only succeed this coming season,
but also in securing an offer for an opportunity past this season. “We do expect
Khalil to be in someone’s college,” he said.
“And that’s the only thing we’ll expect.”
jcoyne@gazette.net

YOURSELF

Continued from Page B-1
But they also do a lot of
things most “normal” people
can’t. Coaches said they must
constantly guard against young
players’ emulation of their favorite players.
“I think when you take it to
the professional level, it’s just a
whole different breed. They’re
freaks of nature who can do
things with their body that the
average person can’t. That’s
why there are so few out there,”
said four-year Northwest High
School football’s defensive line
coach Scott Pierce, a longtime
coach with the Germantown

Albert Einstein High School running back Khalil Wilson.
Sports Association.
Children tend to learn visually, President of Clarksburg
Baseball Scott Davis said. It is
natural for them to want to play
like their favorite athletes.
But no 10-year-old, or high
school student for that matter, is 6 feet, 9 inches and 235
pounds and can pull down a rebound in trafﬁc with one single
outstretched arm like seemingly
half of the NBA.
While it might be hard for
children to understand early in
their development, a foundation built on proper fundamental
skills is integral to their success in
high school, college and beyond.
“I’ll see guys trying to rebound the basketball with one

hand or trying to do too much
dribbling to get by a guy when
you could just keep it simple.
You see things on TV and it’s
tough at times to get people
back to reality. Just because it
might work great for Kevin Durant, it doesn’t mean you should
be trying that stuff,” St. Andrew’s
Episcopal School boys basketball coach Kevin Jones said.
“They shouldn’t be emulating
Kobe’s fadeaway. They should
look at what Kobe does every
single day to get better.”
There is a certain entertainment factor in sports, coaches
agreed, and the best players
can be ﬂashy at times. Coaches
agree that it’s important to instill
good sportsmanship in young

FILE PHOTO

athletes and eliminate the showboating common at the professional level.
But perhaps most importantly, there are some things
children see on television — sliding headﬁrst into home plate,
for example — that are just plain
dangerous. Precautions have
been taken at the lower levels to
ensure athletes’ safety.
In recent years rules have
been implemented in youth
baseball to prevent headfirst
sliding into ﬁrst base and home
plate as well as to avoid high impact collisions at home plate —
something that happens quite
often in Major League Baseball
— said Kenny Roy, who has
coached football, basketball,

near lap 70 and roughly 18
and a half hours of climbing)
— he achieved a mental breakthrough.
“I was kind of thinking to
myself — this is both an amazing feat and a ridiculous feat,”
he said. “Here we are, a bunch
of guys going up and down a
staircase, going nowhere, it’s
kind of ridiculous.
“I was like, ‘I love it, but if
I don’t ﬁnish, I’ll have to come
back and do this crap again.’
You make fun of yourself and
you’re like, ‘How stupid can
this be?’ And I really motivated
myself to pick it up and ﬁnish
this thing. I didn’t let anything
distract me from that point on.”
In 2005, Karlin was in a
snowmobile accident that
nearly ended his stair climbing career just as it was beginning. The vehicle crashed,
flipped over and landed on
his left ankle, shattering the
bone. An emergency surgery
required eight screws and a
plate to be inserted into his
leg. If Karlin’s middle-aged development into an elite athlete
out of relative obscurity wasn’t
enough of a testament to his
determination and willpower,
overcoming that type of injury
and continuing to climb stairs
competitively sure is.
“It makes a difference. I
got the hardware removed,
but there are compensations
softball and baseball for 13 years
with the Olney Boys and Girls
Club.
“You really do have to be
careful. I think the leagues have
done a really good job. In regards to plays at home plate,
you’re supposed to avoid contact if at all possible. If you have
to slide, if a player doesn’t slide
to avoid a potential collision,
they’ve been calling them out,”
Roy said.
Jeter doesn’t need to secure
the baseball in his glove with
his right hand. Durant might
not need to rebound with two
hands. Pittsburgh Steelers safety
Troy Polamalu might be able to
take a running back down without wrapping him up.

or three weeks after every
event.
“He had no real athleticism, per say, but he just
wanted to strengthen his core,”
Karlin’s trainer Elvin Baldwin
said. “I saw something more in
him and we started to get into
performance training and he
became a very good athlete.
“The fact that he is so
coachable really determines
his success.”
Naturally, it can get pretty
tight in the staircase, especially for the elite climbers. But
proper preparation and strategy can help climbers achieve
the best time possible. Always
use the hand rail, Karlin said,
and pivot on the landings instead of shuffling your feet
or taking baby steps. Slower
climbers on the right, faster
climbers on the left.
If Karlin’s participating in
a sprint-distance climb and
needs to stop for water, he’s
having a bad day. But it’s still
likely better than how he performed in high school.
“I’m a late bloomer,” Karlin said. “You preserve some
of your energy that might have
been expended by some other
athletes at the high school
level. I had the reserve and it
kind of helps me to take a bit of
revenge on the track.”
ncammarota@gazette.net
But they put in the work to
get where they are. They are in
a class of their own, one players can work to try and reach —
though so few get there — but
shouldn’t be concerned about
yet.
“If [young tennis players] are
going to emulate anything, they
should really watch the footwork and how the players set up
for the ball and less of how they
swing. The biggest thing right
now is trying to hit the running
forehand slice. They all want to
try and run and slide and hit that
slice, it drives me crazy,” Bullis
School boys tennis coach Steve
Miguel said.
jbeekman@gazette.net

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THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

Page B-3

Growing sport seeks more coaches
Former players
returning to the area
to coach is key to the
sport’s development
n

BY

COLIN STEVENS
STAFF WRITER

DAN GROSS/THE GAZETTE

Richard Montgomery High School ﬁrst-year football coach Josh Klotz (right) works with rising sophomore Alex Page
and other players in the weight room on Wednesday.

RM football coach wants to
win on ﬁeld, in community
n

Klotz hopes creating
challenges leads to
success
BY

COLIN STEVENS
STAFF WRITER

With a cloudless sky above
and a sweltering heat causing
innocent bystanders to sweat despite no physical activity, Phillip
Osborn ran across the grass ﬁeld
behind Richard Montgomery
High School to catch a pass from
coach Josh Klotz.
The ball slapped off of Osborn’s hands and fell to the
ground. Before making his way
back to the receiver’s line, the rising senior dropped to the ground,
without direction to do so, and
did 10 pushups.
“We’re more motivated,”
Osborn said. “We have a lot of
coaches here that are pushing us
harder than the coaches we had
last year. It’s just a different mindset going into the season.”
Entering his ﬁrst season as
the Rockets’ football coach, Klotz
is trying to establish a culture of
hard work and accountability at
the Rockville school.
Klotz comes to Richard
Montgomery after coaching at
Quince Orchard the past seven
years, the last four as offensive
coordinator.
After reaching the state ﬁnals
the past two seasons with the
Cougars, Klotz wanted to take

on a greater role in a program.
He did his research and decided
Richard Montgomery would be a
good ﬁt for him.
“After the end of last season,
I just wanted to be around football more,” said Klotz, who will
also teach English at Richard
Montgomery. “I wanted to have
a greater inﬂuence on a greater
number of kids. I thought I was
able to help out a bunch of guys
at QO and be a role model and
help turn them into men. But as
a head coach, I’m able to directly
impact even more young men
and help them out. And I wanted
the personal challenge.”
Klotz said he likes to challenge himself, just like he hopes
his players seek a challenge.
During the offseason, he’s
tried to create a competitive atmosphere every day, ending each
workout session with a contest.
Joshua Dyson has bought
in. He has attended every workout since Klotz arrived and has
seen his body change. He’s
gained around 15 pounds, going up from 170 to 185, and has
increased his bench press by 50
pounds (195 to 245).
“We’ve got new coaches
and I want to establish myself
as a person that wants it and is
a hard worker,” Dyson said. “I
know if I take one day off, then
I’m going to take more. Then I’m
going to just sit back and get lazy
while other people are working
their [behind] off.”

Klotz said he’s going to build
his offense around his talent, so
he said the offense won’t necessarily look like what was run
at Quince Orchard. But he did
promise that the Rockets will run
a no huddle.
“I’m ﬂexible,” said Klotz, who
brought Mike Wheeler with him
from Quince Orchard to run the
defense. “Whatever is best for
our players. We’ll build around
our talent.”
While he is happy with what
his players have done athletically
so far, Klotz also beams when
talking about what they do away
from the ﬁeld. The players went
to area elementary schools during the offseason to read to
students, and also held questionand-answer sessions with older
students. They’ve also helped
with youth camps.
Klotz believes that in building
a program, it goes beyond what
happens on the ﬁeld.
“I keep stressing — wins and
losses are obviously important
to me, and what we do on the
ﬁeld is important, but the last ﬁve
months it’s also rewarding to see
just how, when we reach out to
the community, how supportive
everyone is,” Klotz said. “When
we get into the football season, the
whole idea of a program and community is going to come together
and support the team and build
that relationship. That’s exciting.”
cstevens@gazette.net

Poolesville polo club growing quickly
n

Club has expanded from
seven members to 81
BY JACOB BOGAGE
STAFF WRITER

It takes a lot of care to play
one of the oldest sports, polo.
Poolesville’s Capitol Polo Club
has 90 horses that need daily care
on its 170 acres.
The ﬁeld they play on, all 30
acres, requires nearly as much
care as the turf is cut thick but
short. Hoof marks are stomped
out. Manure is scooped away
briskly.
General manager Marcos
Bignoli left his native Argentina
in 2008 to take over the Capitol
Polo Club and since, the club has
increased in popularity, now playing the sport ﬁve times a week,
six months a year. Since Bignoli
started at Capitol Polo, the club’s
membership has increased from
seven members to 81.
The club hosts sanctioned
tournaments every weekend and
a number of large professional
charity tournaments every year.
Polo players are assigned
a handicap ranging from -2 for
beginners to 10 for the best. As a
professional, Bignoli, 55, carried a
handicap of 6 — one of 50 active
players at the time to do so — until he retired to play recreationally, pursue a career in real estate
and run his ranch and polo club
in Pilar, Argentina.
“Everybody in polo knows
who Marcos Bignoli is,” club coowner and Bethesda resident T.
Hoy Booker.
Bignoli started the club’s polo
academy, which currently has 30
students, to help take the edge off
the game many view as dangerous or cruel to both horse and
horseman.

TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE

Capitol Polo Club rider Marcos Bignoli (left) participates in a match on Sunday in Poolesville.
Neither is true, Bignoli says.
Riders at the polo academy start
slow and learn to ride with one
hand before even touching a
mallet or ball. After three months,
they progress to play games.
Horses, on the other hand, train
for two years before they can enter a match.
“When you are training a
horse from out West, lets say
Wyoming, Montana, and it’s ...
raised with cattle and it’s been
roped off, it’s easier — a horse
that’s been exposed to pressure
and things being swung around
their heads,” Bignoli said. “When
you train a thoroughbred off the
track, you need a lot of patience.”
A match begins or resumes
after a goal with a referee throwing the rock-hard ball between
two teams of four players each.
From there, more experienced horsemen maneuver their
steeds to pass the ball forward to
where an attacker can break away
from the pack and at 40 miles per
hour with defensemen in hot

pursuit. To prevent a goal, players
can hook an opponent’s mallet
from the right side or bump an attack off their line on the left side.
Never can a defenseman cross in
front of the ball or an attackman
for safety reasons.
“It’s kind of an adrenaline
rush,” attackman Pat Post, 53, of
Potomacsaid.“It’sfullblast.These
horses are going 30, 40 miles per
hour. It can be a bit scary.”
Booker says most beginners
ﬁnd they love the rush of the
game and the social aspect of
the club even more. Since polo
is such a time-consuming sport
and economic investment, club
dues cost $4,000. The fee does
not include the cost of purchasing a horse or renting two or
three per match.
“People come out here on a
whim and they end up staying,”
he said. “You get ‘em to buy one
horse and it’s all over.”
jbogage@gazette.net

When John Pino’s eldest
daughter, Daniella, started
playing lacrosse several years
ago, he knew little to nothing
about the sport.
The Damascus resident
had never played lacrosse, had
only seen a handful of games
before and admits he didn’t
know what was happening. But
with a lack of available coaches
in the area, he and two other
fathers decided to immerse
themselves in the sport so they
could take up the coaching
reigns. There wasn’t another
option.
“I was the true, stereotypical dad that was forced into
learning on the spot,” Pino
said. “There are very few girls
lacrosse coaches. So I made it
a mission. I can’t help if I don’t
know about lacrosse.”
Lacrosse is one of the
fastest growing sports in the
country. From 2011 to 2012,
the participation rate grew 5.5
percent, according to a study
by USA Lacrosse, and in the
last five years, participation
among females has increased
by 67 percent. With the rapid
increase in numbers, a lack of
quality coaching, especially
at the recreational levels, has
stunted the growth in the quality of the game.
Top coaches in the area
are naturally attracted to high
school and club coaching positions, which allows them to
work with the best talent.
Sherwood High School
and Rebels club coach Kelly
Hughes, a Sherwood graduate
who played in college at Iona,
said it’s natural for players who
competed in college to gravitate towards higher levels of
competition when returning to
the coaching ranks.
Parents taking over coaching duties “is really common,”
Hughes said. “There are a lot
of dads, which is great because
they love sports, but they’re not
getting the same understanding of how the game and the
rules work together. ... You’re
not getting the same stuff [on
the ﬁeld], but it’s the same lessons and the same game. But I

TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE

Stingers A Division girls youth lacrosse players Olivia Vozzo (left) and
Casey Leach (right) try to stop Taylor DeRose as she advances on the
goal during a Monday clinic at Ovid Hazen Wells Park in Clarksburg.
don’t mind it because at least
they’re playing.”
Recent Damascus High
School graduate Colby Muller,
who is signed with Old Dominion University, said just getting
out and playing is the most important thing.
When she was younger,
Muller played for Pino and her
father, Frank, and enjoyed having male coaches.
“From a defensive and
physical perspective, that’s
how guys play the game and I
can see how that helped more,”
she said.
This summer, Colby Muller
coached a team of rising eighth
graders and got a different perspective of the game.
“When my dad would
coach me, he’d tell me things
that the coaches can see, but
as a player I wouldn’t really
see what he was seeing,” said
Muller, who is also helping
coach at a clinic Pino is hosting
this week. “But from a coach’s
view, there’s a whole different perspective. It’s amazing
because you can teach them
these things. It’s easy to solve
and I can work on the ﬁeld, too,
so it’s a lot of fun.”
Muller represents the next
phase of coaching in Montgomery County.
Hughes and Pino agree
that for lacrosse to take the
next step, girls returning from
college need to take up more of
a role in the coaching ranks.
That’s easier said than

done. Hughes said she knows
plenty of viable former players
in the area. But with jobs that
aren’t conducive to coaching
travel teams and more involved
programs, it can be difﬁcult to
ﬁnd time. But coaching at the
recreational level is more doable, with fewer practices and
games being played in the area.
Coaches like Pino, who
didn’t have to learn about lacrosse until they were forced
to, are still playing a strong role.
He said he spent countless hours watching other top
coaches, using “osmosis” to
pick up on whatever information he could. He took certiﬁcation classes through USA
Lacrosse. When Pino hosts
clinics or practices — he currently coaches the Damascus
Stingers U15 team, which won
the Metro Girls Lacrosse championship this spring — he encourages parents to come out
and learn about the sport.
Still, he hopes it is feasible
in the future for former girls
lacrosse players to be afforded
a greater role in the coaching
community.
“To get kids who went
to college to come back and
coach, they’re struggling [after
college] and are working more
hours and are not earning as
much,” Pino said. “We have to
make it worthwhile.”
cstevens@gazette.net

Gaithersburg Giants inﬁelder Andrew
Frazier throws out a batter against
the visiting Frederick Hustlers on
Thursday at Kelley Park.

Giants received a first-round
bye in the double-elimination
tournament and played Monday at Joe Cannon Stadium
against Dig In. The result ended
too late to be included in this
edition of The Gazette.
“We’re glad we got him,”
said Giants coach Gary Holzapfel of Meiners. “We contacted
him pretty early and locked him
up. Everything that I’ve heard
about him has been true.”
In the eighth inning, with
the Giants batting, a foul ball
hit the massive screen on the
first-base side of Kelley Field
and plummeted down toward
the players in the dugout. Meiners sprung forward, made a
two-handed over-the-shoulder
catch and threw the ball back to
the umpire. He tipped his cap.
“I’m really conﬁdent going
into the playoffs. It’s a really
good group of guys,” said Meiners. “It’s a good mix of local and
guys from out of town.”
Last season in college,
Meiners played in 40 games and
batted .268 with 20 runs scored
and 18 runs batted in.
If the Giants (18-14) hope
to achieve their ultimate goal of
winning the MCBL title, they’ll
likely need to do so by beating
the Baltimore Chop (31-1).
“The four games we’ve
played them, all of them have
been close,” Meiners said.
“We’re not intimidated by
them.”

Before the start of the
seventh inning on Friday,
Damascus Post 171 pitching
coach Daryl Keys pulled his
starter, Grant Dickey, aside
and rested his hands on Dickey’s shoulders.
The rest of the team was
huddled around manager
Tommy Davis in front of Post
171’s dugout, while the conference between Keys and
Dickey was happening a few
feet away under the lights at
Kelley Park in Gaithersburg.
Dickey, who was three
outs away from pitching a
shutout that would send his
club to the American Legion
Maryland state championship tournament, liked what
he heard.
“He told me to have fun
with these three outs,” Dickey
said of his chat with Keys.
“And that he wasn’t going to
take me out.”

Dickey made quick work
of Sandy Spring Post 68’s ﬁnal
three batters of the game, putting the ﬁnishing touches on
Damascus’ 8-0 victory against
last year’s state champions
in the double-elimination
Montgomery County tournament. The sturdy righthander allowed four hits,
walked two and struck out
two as he pitched to contact
and pounded the strike zone.
While Sandy Spring stung a
few balls, nearly all of them
were right at Post 171’s outﬁelders.
“If you’re talking about
the ability to throw ﬁrst-pitch
strikes and control, you’re
talking Grant Dickey,” Davis
said of the Sherwood High
School graduate. “If he’s going to throw strikes and we’re
going to make the plays behind him, it’s going to force
a team to really string some
hits together and it’s a tough
match for them to do that.”
Damascus’ big inning was
the bottom of the third. The
regular season champs (214) scored six runs — four off
of Post 68 left-handed starter
Kyle Cassidy and two against
right-handed reliever Marcus
Hailstock. Post 171’s Zach
Thompson stroked a two-

run double into the left ﬁeld
corner and John Hanley and
Michael Zerafa also delivered
doubles in the decisive frame.
“I’m so proud of everyone. They’ve put in so much
work during the season to get
us that ﬁrst seed and we really came together today and
put together that big inning,”
said leadoff batter and center
ﬁelder Emory McMinn. “We
did what we’ve been doing all
season stepped it up when it
counted.”
Despite the loss, Post 68’s
season isn’t over. They’ll have
TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE
the opportunity to make the
Damascus
Post
171
player Zach
state tournament by winning
Thompson
swings
the
bat against
a play-in game against a team
Sandy
Spring
Post
68
on Friday.
(to be determined) from Anne
Arundel County at 1 p.m.
Sunday at Severna Park High Damascus became the first
School. Sandy Spring won the American Legion team from
play-in game last season be- Montgomery County to win a
fore going on to dominate the state title in 2000.
“We know what it takes,”
state tournament.
Damascus, meanwhile, Davis said. “We think the
was scheduled to open the components are there, but
tournament against the host, we’re going to have to prove
Cumberland Post 13, at 7:30 it on the ﬁeld. But going up
p.m. on Tuesday at Veterans there with the club we have,
Field in Cumberland. The re- we’re fine with that. We’re
sult ended too late to be in- looking forward to having
cluded in this edition of The some fun and playing good
Gazette.
baseball.”
It is be Post 171’s ﬁrst state
tournament appearance since
ncammarota@gazette.net

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Damascus Post 171’s Daniel Johnson ﬁelds the ball for an out against Sandy Spring Post 68 during Friday’s game at Kelley Park.

1894688

In all the years Gaithersburg
Giants shortstop Nate Meiners has played baseball, he had
never experienced any arm issues until recently.
He played in Little League,
travel ball and started at St.
John’s College High School.
Meiners could play shortstop
and pitch for days.
But one cold afternoon last
year — Meiners’ ﬁrst game with
Randolph Macon College — the
tendons in his right shoulder
reached their breaking point.
“My arm had been bothering me a little bit up to that
point in practices, but that
game was the ﬁnal straw,” said
Meiners, who started at shortstop. “I played in one game my
freshman year.”
Meiners received a medical
redshirt and spent the spring
rehabbing his arm, watching his
teammates play and longing to
be on the ﬁeld.
“It was the ﬁrst arm pain
I’ve ever had in my life. My arm
had always been rubber. I could
throw forever,” said Meiners,
who grew up in Silver Spring. “I
pretty much dreaded going to
physical therapy. ... It deﬁnitely
wasn’t easy.”
Meiners has since worked
his way to a full recovery —
something that’s not easy to accomplish with shoulder injuries
— and is one of the catalysts on
the Giants’ talented roster following a successful sophomore
season at Randolph Macon.
Meiners had a hit, a run and
a walk in Gaithersburg’s 9-7 victory against the Frederick Hustlers at Kelley Park on Thursday,
helping the Giants secure the
second overall seed in the
Maryland Collegiate Baseball
League playoffs,.
University of Delaware
right-hander Chad Martin
tossed six superb innings — allowed one hit, six strikeouts and
three walks — on a blisteringly
hot evening to get the win. The

THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

B-CC graduate signs
with D.C. United
Soccer star hopes
to make most of his
opportunity in Major
League Soccer

n

BY JORDAN

COYNE

FILE PHOTO

B-CC High School graduate Collin
Martin recently signed with D.C.
United.

older brother, Trevor, who
played for George Washington University.
“He had me out there
... always training, always
teaching me how to get better,” Martin said.
Although he is currently
not in school, Martin said he
and his family value his education, and he will deﬁnitely
return to school. He is currently working on transferring to George Washington
University to major in either
English or journalism.
Martin, along with fellow
newcomer Syamsir Alam,
made his debut to a home
crowd at RFK Stadium on
July 12 in an international
friendly game against Chivas
de Guadalajara.
“I think he did ﬁne in the
game ... It was nice to be able
to throw him into the ﬁre,”
Olsen said. “There’s not a lot
of fear in that kid ... it’s up to
us to develop him now.”
jcoyne@gazette.net

It looked strange, seeing a
Col. Zadok Magruder High School
boys basketball team take the
court without a guards J.J. Epps or
Nick Grifﬁn. Two four-year varsity
starters, Montgomery County’s
most formidable backcourt tandem combined for 84 wins, a state
title and two more region titles
— Magruder’s ﬁnest era of basketball.
In Wednesday’s 61-41 loss
to Clarksburg in a Montgomery
County summer league playoff
game at Thomas S. Wootton, the
growing pains being weathered in
the post-Grifﬁn/Epps reign were
evident, as were signs of a different type of basketball, however.
“Everybody is going to sleep
on Magruder,” commented St.
Andrew’s coach Kevin Jones during the ﬁrst half. “I think they’re
going to surprise some people.”
Given how most everybody
seems to be looking at the Colonels as a bygone, any amount of
wins will likely be labeled a surprise.
“Everybody thinks we’re going to suck,” Magruder coach Dan
Harwood rather candidly told
his team after the game. “But the
thing is, everybody can be as good
as they want to be. We can be as

On July 10, Collin Martin fulfilled a dream. The
Bethesda-Chevy Chase High
School graduate signed a
professional soccer contract
with D.C. United’s ﬁrst team.
Martin, who has been
playing soccer since he was 3,
is happy to be living a dream
he’s had since he was 8. After four years on United’s
Academy team and one year
on Wake Forest University’s
team, he said he is excited for
the opportunity.
“I’ve never been like a
goal person ... but there’s no
reason not to hope for the
best,” he said after training
last week. “For these next six
months, I want to train consistently well.”
D.C. United coach Ben
Olsen said that Martin’s
growth and development
over the past two years was
what really caught their attention.
“Collin is a kid we’ve
had our eye on for awhile ...
We’ve always known he was
a very talented kid,” he said.
“He wants to take it to the
next level, and he was excited
to do it, so that’s always a big
part of this.”
Having been a part of an
Academy team that won the
Major League Soccer Cup
multiple times, Martin has
traveled all over the world.
He said his favorite destination so far has been South
Africa.
“I got to see crazy things,”
he said. “Culturally it was so
different from America. I got
to pet baby lions, and that
was so cool.”
Growing up, one of Martin’s biggest mentors was his

Page B-5

good as we want to be.”
Predictably, considering
Magruder’s loss of eight players and more than 65 points per
game, the Colonels went through
spells of miscommunications
and sloppy basketball and then
stretches of impressive resilience.
With about six minutes left, Josiah
Jones, the team’s third leading returning scorer (3 points per game)
went on a run of and-one buckets
and 3-pointers to whittle the lead
to 12 while the defense forced a
string of turnovers on the opposite end.
“It just gives us more opportunities,” Jones said of the team’s
steadfast approach on the defensive end. “Our offense obviously
needs a lot of work but I think
we’re going to be picking it up on
defense.”
Sure, Clarksburg would go
on to win comfortably and without much of a real threat, but the
Colonels gave the Coyotes a lot
more ﬁght than many may have
expected. Over the summer, the
chemistry of meshing together a
team of bench players and junior
varsity up-and-comers has been
somewhat smoothed out, though
it still has its kinks. The offense, after relying on one of the county’s
best backcourts, showed signs of
life in Jones’ slashes and Danny
Schaerr’s muscled drives.
But the defense, that’s what
has Harwood excited the most.
“It’s going to be a nightmare
on Muncaster Mill,” he joked.

Earlier this month, Gus Gill
was content on spending his ﬁnal summer before college playing for Dig In Baseball, a team in
the Maryland Collegiate Baseball
League.
But in mid-July, Gill, who
graduated from Walter Johnson
HighSchoolinthespring,wasable
to fulﬁll a childhood dream. On
July 13, he made his unexpected
debut in the Cal Ripken Collegiate
Baseball League as a member of
the Silver Spring-Takoma Thunderbolts. In fact, his ﬁrst game was
at Shirley Povich Field against the
Bethesda Big Train, a venue and
organization he frequently visited
while growing up.
“It’s actually is a dream come
true being up here and [playing
with my brother],” said Gill, who
went 2-for-5 in his debut with a
double and a run scored. “I’ve always known the Ripken League is
the best [college-age] competition
and talent around this area. I’ve
been watching this league all my
life because I went to so many Big

TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE

Walter Johnson High School graduates and brothers Mac (left) and Gus Gill
play together for the Silver Spring-Takoma Thunderbolts.
Train games with my travel teams
as a fan. I kind of hoped I played
for them someday.”
Gill, who is hitting .286 (as
of Monday) in limited action as
the Thunderbolts (11-26 record)
shortstop, joined the summer
wood bat league at the request
of manager Doug Remer, who
also coaches at Springbrook High
School. Gill’s older brother, Mac,
a rising senior at the University of
Maryland, Baltimore County, has
been pitching for Silver Spring all
summer. Mac owns a 2-4 record
with a 6.24 earned-run average in

nine games (seven starts).
“With Mac on the team and
having coached [Montgomery
County High School baseball],
we had Gus on our mind before
the season,” Remer said. “We had
a couple injuries. ... We knew he
was a good ball player with good
defense and he’s a gamer.”
Gus, who threw a no-hitter
against Winston Churchill on
April 17 and established Walter
Johnson’s single-game record for
strikeouts (13), is expected to attend Montgomery College in the
fall and play for the Raptors. He

was recruited out of high school
by a few Division I college programs to pitch, but would prefer
to play every day at the next level.
“My goal has always been to
play D-I,” Gus said. “I feel I can go
to MC like my brother did, grow as
a player and then transfer.
“I’m playing against guys that
have top-notch talent this summer. I was a little nervous in the
ﬁrst game, but I have a lot of conﬁdence in myself.”
Added Remer: “It’s obvious
playing in the Ripken League
against older, established college
players — not many kids that
just graduated high school play
up here — is going to help him.
Unless he struck out every single
at-bat and makes 42 errors in one
game, this is a good experience
and thing that will help him get a
head start on college ball.”
The Gills come from a strong
baseball pedigree. Their father,
Rich, played at Catholic University, and they are St. Louis Cardinal fans. Rich grew up listening to
Cardinals games on the radio.
“We’vealwaysdonebaseball,”
Gus said. “We played whifﬂe ball,
it is just what we do.”
kzakour@gazette.net

Rising Bullis School senior No. 1 singles player Kasey
Countee’s ﬁrst instinct on the
tennis court is to get to the net.
In an age where powerful
baseliners have taken over the
sport, it is quite rare, especially
at the high-school level, for
someone to be so comfortable
moving forward.
“It’s kind of old school. I
like quick points. I don’t like
staying out on the court that
much. If you stay out there too
long, you tire yourself out,”
Countee said.
Classmate Darian Hashemzadeh, however, prefers to stay
back. He thrives in the marathon match environment his
teammate consciously avoids.
A self-proclaimed grinder on
the court, Hashemzadeh prefers to work the point from the

1907264

baseline and wait for his opponent to make an error or the
right opportunity to make his
move.
Their contrasting styles of
play, though both boast big
serves, have led each to individual success — Countee won
his third consecutive Interstate
Athletic Conference tournament singles title this spring,
the last two coming at No. 1
singles, and Hashemzadeh
went undefeated en route to
his second consecutive tournament title in the second singles
slot.
But they also complement
each other well in a doubles
setting, the two agreed. In an
important summer — Bullis
coach Steve Miguel said they
are working to get noticed by
college coaches — Countee
and Hashemzadeh have shot
up the U.S. Tennis Association
rankings.
The No. 1-ranked player in
the USTA Mid-Atlantic Section
Boys 18s, Countee is ranked
No. 181 of 2,095 nationally.
Hashemzadeh is No. 7 in the
USTA Mid-Atlantic Section,
293rd nationally.

Two regional doubles titles
together this summer, in New
York and California, in addition
to a few ﬁnal appearances, have
not just helped boost the teammates’ individual rankings, but
their conﬁdence on the singles
court, they said. Skills used in
doubles, like the use of angles
and getting to the net, can also
be translated into his singles
game, Hashemzadeh added.
“I think [Kasey and I] really match up well together in
doubles. If I wasn’t partners
with Kasey I don’t think I’d be
winning that much. I’ll work
the point, cross-court, and he’ll
poach over and ﬁnish at the
net. He comes in so fast. I think
the one thing he has that no
other player [in this area] has
that I’ve seen is he has the best
anticipation. He knows exactly
when to poach and when not to
poach,” Hashemzadeh said.
Though Countee and Hashemzadeh have settled at the top
of Bullis’ lineup, their paths
there were quite different.
When Countee was 4, he
was selected from a class at
the Junior Tennis Champions
Center catered toward ﬁnding

athletes with good hand-eye
coordination. Thus started his
tennis journey.
He was recruited in sixth
grade by former Bulldogs
coach Jack Schore to feed into
a program that was nearly
untouchable for most of the
2000s — Bullis’ streak of seven
straight IAC titles was snapped
in 2011 — and recognized as
one of the best high-school
programs in the nation.
By eighth grade he was
practicing and holding his
own with the guys on the varsity squad. “I almost played
in eighth grade. But then I
wouldn’t have been allowed
to play senior year. But I traveled with the team and that was
fun,” Countee said.
The following year, in the
spring of 2011, Countee announced himself as one of the
league’s best by winning the
No. 2 singles bracket at the IAC
tournament.
“Kasey has a really good feel
for the game. He changes the
pace well. He is always looking
to come in,” Miguel said.
jbeekman@gazette.net

Page B-6

THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

KEEPING IT BRIEF

DAN GROSS/THE GAZETTE

Our Lady of Good Counsel High School graduate Brendan Marshall (right) rolls out to pass against Gilman last year.

Good Counsel to play
Gilman on ESPNEWS

1907263

The Our Lady of Good
Counsel High School football
team is scheduled to play the
Gilman School at 8:30 p.m.
Aug. 23 at Towson University
in a game ESPNEWS plans to
televise. It is expected to be
the season opener for two of
the state’s best programs.
Hosting Gilman last year,
Good Counsel won, 20-19,
in overtime. Running back
Dorian O’Daniel ran for two
touchdowns, and wide receiver Kendall Fuller caught
the other.
However, O’Daniel is moving onto Clemson, and Fuller
to Virginia Tech.

Good Counsel will be
breaking in several new starters after winning the Washington Catholic Athletic
Conference title the past four
seasons.
This is the Falcons fourth
game on national television
since 2008.
Good Counsel played DeMatha that year, St. Xavier in
2010, and Bishop Gorman of
Nevada last year.
Gilman was also on national television last season,
losing to Archbishop Moeller
of Cincinnati.
The Greyhounds ﬁnished
the year at 9-2, defeating Calvert Hall for the Maryland
Interscholastic Athletic Association championship.
— DAN FELDMAN

BILL RYAN/THE GAZETTE

Our Lady of Good Counsel High
School rising junior quarterback
Bryan Strittmatter is expected to
start this fall.

THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

Page B-7
Mia Branco (left),
Imagination
Stage access
coordinator,
and and Diane
Nutting, director
of access and
inclusion, chat
with occupational
therapist Roger
Ideishi after
he viewed a
performance of
“Peter Pan and
Wendy.” Ideishi
was called in to
suggest where
tweaks could be
made, so children
with special
needs can watch
the play without
experiencing sensory overload.
PHOTOS BY DAN GROSS/
THE GAZETTE

New performance style opens doors for autistic children
Play’s content
doesn’t change — just the
way it is presented
n

BY

KATIE POHLMAN

SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE

The theater is packed with
kids eagerly waiting for the show
to begin. One man sits in an aisle
seat with a notepad opened on
his lap and a pen in his hand,
ready to take notes.
He’ll be marking down all
of the points in “Peter Pan and
Wendy” when the lights might
flash too quickly, the sound
might be too loud or an action
might be too surprising.
This is the ﬁrst step in occupational therapist Roger
Ideishi’s role in helping Imagination Stage in Bethesda
produce a sensory-friendly
performance.
Imagination Stage ran four
shows of this type in its 2012-13
season. Sensory-friendly shows
are aimed at families with children on the autism spectrum
and or with other sensory, social
or learning needs.
Many of the families who
attend these shows can’t attend
normal performances because
of society’s reaction to their
children’s actions, said Diane
Nutting, director of access and
inclusion at Imagination Stage.
“These shows let families be
who they are,” she said.

Producing a performance
When selling tickets for the
show, Imagination Stage leaves
pockets of empty seats around
families to allow easy movement
if necessary.
Some children stand close
to the stage, leaning in to absorb
the play, Nutting said. Once, a
child ran around the theater for
a whole show, taking breaks every once in a while to watch the
actors.
“It’s a hodgepodge of reactions,” Nutting said. “There’s no

(From left) Dan Van Why, Justine Moral and Matt Dewberry perform in “Peter
Pan and Wendy” before a sold-out Imagination Stage in Bethesda on Friday.
textbook case of how these children will react to the play.”
The key, she said, is preparation — for both the families and
the actors.
Actors go through training
to learn about what they might
hear or see in the audience while
on stage. They also run scenes
that have been adjusted.
Ideishi doesn’t change the
script for sensory-friendly performances — he just adds clarity to it.
In a meeting with members
of the Imagination Stage team
after watching “Peter Pan and
Wendy,” Ideishi discussed making the message clearer for the
audience. Instead of implying
that the actors want the audience to answer a question or
tell them what to do, he said
they should clearly ask questions such as, “What should I do
next?”
Ideishi also recommended
providing background on the
“Peter Pan” story to the audience either during or before the
show to give some context.
Imagination Stage helps
families prepare for shows
by giving them guidelines —
known as “social stories” — on
how to pick up tickets, where the
bathrooms are and how the theater looks.
The families receive another

set of guidelines on the day of
the event, as well, to tell them
what will happen during the
play itself. There are suggestions
for what the children can do if
they are scared or surprised.
“If the music is too loud for
me I can cover my ears, put on
my headphones, or hug my
mom or dad,” one set of guidelines said.
Once in the auditorium,
there are also Imagination Stage
staff sitting in the corners with
glow sticks. When a surprising
scene is approaching or the actors are about to walk through
the audience, the staff will raise
the glow sticks as a warning sign
for the audience.
Nutting said the warnings
and suggestions for surprising
events are preparing children to
know how they can react when
watching a conventional show
in the future. Going through the
experience also prepares them
for life, she said.
“Life is surprising,” Nutting
said.

‘We all beneﬁt’
Ideishi always has been interested in how people with
developmental needs interact
with society. Once he realized
this community didn’t have

much involvement in society, he
wanted to work to change that.
“I wanted to reach out to
community organizations to
make [these families] be able to
go out more,” Ideishi said.
Through his work with museums, theaters and aquariums, Ideishi created a way for
families with children who
don’t develop typically to experience what everyone else
does. He currently works with
about six organizations spread
out among Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh and the Washington, D.C., area, including the
Smithsonian Institution and
the Kennedy Center.
Now, it seems his dream is
coming true. Nutting said families with typically developing
children have attended the last
two sensory-friendly performances at Imagination Stage.
This trend is happening at
other organizations. too.
Betty Siegel, director of
VSA — formerly known as Very
Special Arts — and Accessibility at the Kennedy Center, said
all families who attend sensoryfriendly performances beneﬁt,
not just those with non-typically
developing children.
The performances are “really about enabling families in
the community who have children, typically or not typically
developing, to have engaged
theater experiences,” she said.
The Kennedy Center began
producing sensory-friendly performances in 2012 when it had
four performances. It plans to
present ﬁve in the 2013-14 season.
Siegel said there is much
collaboration among the Smithsonian, Imagination Stage and
other public venues involved
with sensory-friendly activities.
“We’re collaborative in nature,” she said. “It’s not an area
of competition — it’s about
helping the community. We all
beneﬁt.”
kpohlman@gazette.net

State issues new protocols
for heart attack patients
15 minutes of CPR
now precede taking
patient to hospital

n

BY

A change in the way paramedics treat cardiac arrest patients could delay their arrival to
the hospital, but could also increase their chances of survival.
New protocols released
by the Maryland Institute for
Emergency Medical Services
Systems create two major practice changes for EMS providers.
As of July 1, providers will ﬁrst
treat medical cardiac arrest patients on the scene rather than
rushing them to a hospital.
They also now have the
authority to declare a patient
dead on the scene.
“The public expects that
we swoop in, we scoop up the
patient, and we swoop out,”
said Alan Butsch, battalion
chief for the EMS section of
Montgomery County Fire &
Rescue Service.
Now, EMS providers are required to perform “high-quality
continuous CPR” for 15 minutes
on the scene. If a patient regains
cardiac activity during that time,
then the patient would be taken
to a hospital.
The prior practice in
Montgomery County was to
get the patient to a hospital as
soon as possible, Butsch said.
“We now know that their
best chance of survival comes
within that 15-minute window
and that it depends on effective CPR (which you cannot
do when moving the patient)
in combination with the advanced techniques our paramedics can do,” Butsch wrote
in an email.
Cardiac arrest survival
rates are already very low.
Nationally, there are roughly
383,000 cardiac arrests that
occur outside a hospital each
year, and fewer than 8 percent
of these patients survive, according to the American Heart
Association’s website.
In Montgomery County,
EMS is dispatched for a cardiac arrest roughly once or
twice per day, Butsch said. Of
those, about half are actually
cardiac arrest patients.
Successful treatment is a
race against time. The American Heart Association calls this
the “chain of survival” — noticing a cardiac arrest and calling
for emergency help, early CPR,
defibrillation, “advanced life
support,” and proper care afterwards.
The ﬁrst steps in this chain,
medical ofﬁcials said, might be
the most crucial.
“If we are going to save
them, we are going to save
them right there,” said Richard
Alcorta, EMS medical director
at the state institute. “For every

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minute that someone is in arrest
with no CPR, the chance of saving them drops by 10 percent.”
After 15 minutes of CPR,
EMS providers also can now
declare a patient deceased and
stop resuscitation attempts if
the cardiac arrest did not occur while they were on the
scene and the patient does not
have a “shockable rhythm”;
that is, the person won’t be revived with a deﬁbrillator.
In other cases, EMS can still
stop resuscitation, but only after
consulting with a doctor.
There are exceptions. EMS
providers cannot terminate resuscitation for minors, pregnant
women, or those with cardiac
arrest due to hypothermia or
submersion. Families also can
request that a patient still be
taken to a hospital, Butsch said.
Before the change, EMS
providers in Montgomery
County could declare a patient
dead after 30 minutes of no
pulse or breath if the provider
consulted with an emergency
room physician, Butsch said.
The focus of these new
protocols is on patient care,
but there is always a risk to
consider when ambulances
move through trafﬁc with sirens and lights on.
In an emailed statement,
the American Heart Association
wrote, “In short, staying on the
scene can reduce unnecessary
transport to the hospital, reduces road hazards during the
transport, reduces EMS exposure to biohazards, and reduces
the need for Emergency Department pronouncement.”
There were 55 ambulance
collisions in the county in 2012
out of 80,000 EMS calls per
year, Butsch said. Of those 55,
17 were trafﬁc collisions in an
emergency situation and one
caused injuries.
“Most collisions were minor and had nothing to do with
trafﬁc and the use of red lights
and siren — so I can’t say that
[Montogmery County Fire &
Rescue] sees transporting cardiac arrests as a signiﬁcant injury risk,” he wrote in an email.
Statewide, 182 crashes
were reported to police involving an ambulance or emergency vehicle in an emergency
situation in 2011 and 239 the
prior year, according to a University of Maryland, Baltimore
analysis of Maryland Automated Accident Reporting
System data.
Although these protocol
changes affect the behavior of
paramedics, medical officials
emphasized that the moments
before they arrive count as well.
“The patients that do better are the ones who had bystander CPR,” said Kiersten
Henry, a cardiac nurse practitioner at MedStar Montgomery Medical Center. “If you
don’t know how to do handsonly CPR, learn it.”

Page B-8

THE GAZETTE

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

Wednesday, July 24, 2013 g

Classifieds

Page B-9

Call 301-670-7100 or email class@gazette.net

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The Department of the Navy (Navy) announces the availability of the Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the proposed Medical Facilities Development and University Expansion at Naval Support Activity (NSA) Bethesda, Bethesda, Montgomery County, Maryland. The Final EIS assessed the potential environmental impacts associated
with the proposed actions at NSA Bethesda to implement the Congressional mandate in
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ATTN: 29

UNEMPLOYED?
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Notice of Application to Establish a
Branch of a State Member Bank
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that SunTrust Bank, Atlanta, Fulton
County, Georgia intends to apply to the Federal Reserve Board
DISH NETWORK.
for permission to establish a branch at 14112 Darnestown Road, Starting at
Germantown, MD 20874 to be popularly known as the $19.99/month (for 12
Darnestown Office. The Federal Reserve considers a number of mos.) & High Speed
factors in deciding whether to approve the application including Internet starting at
the record of performance of applicant banks in helping to meet $14.95/month (where
available) SAVE! Ask
local credit needs.
About SAME DAY InYou are invited to submit comments in writing on this application stallation! CALL Now!
to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, 1000 Peachtree Street 1-877-992-1237
N.E., Atlanta, Georgia 30309-4470 and the Georgia Department
of Banking and Finance, 2990 Brandywine Road, Suite 200, At- FAMILIES NEEDED
TO HOST INTERlanta, Georgia 30341-5565. The comment period will not end be- NATIONAL HIGH
fore August 8th, 2013 and may be somewhat longer. The Board’s SCHOOL
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Part 262. Procedures for processing protested applications may STUDENTS. Stube found at 12 C.F.R. 262.25. To obtain a copy of the Federal Re- dents have full insurserve Board’s procedures, or if you need more information about ance & spending monhow to submit your comments on the application, contact ey. Open your Home
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received in writing by the Reserve Bank on or before the last day touch w/your inner self
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of the comment period.
Sign, Call today for

County Facilities, Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett
has proposed that the Montgomery County Pre-Release Center
be renamed the Neal Potter Pre-Release Center.

The public is invited to submit comments on this proposal to Michael L. Subin, Office of the County Executive, 101 Monroe
Street, Rockville, Maryland, 20850 or via email to
michael.subin@montgomerycountymd.gov. Comments must be
received by Thursday, August 22, 2013.

Full-time position available for a home day care center in
Kensington, Md for about 7 babies and toddlers. Must love
children. Will pay for CPR, first aid, SIDS training and a
security check. Great pay. Two weeks of paid vacation and
off all major holidays. See my website for more information:
Ondercare.com Call Adrienne at (301) 530-7980.

NURSING ASSISTANT

TRAINING IN JUST 4 WEEKS
We offer Medication Technician
in just 4 days. Call for details.

FT, for large, garden style condominiumcommunity in N.
Bethesda. Candidate will possess carpentry, drywall,
landscaping, and basic electrical skills as well as a working
knowledge of tools and equipment used to perform daily
tasks. Must be willing to work outside and be on call
(minimal). Own transportation and background check
required. Good salary & benefits. Please send resumes to
thegablesontuckerman@verizon.net or fax to 301-770-0635.

LEAD A/V INSTALLER
Audio Design Solutions, Inc., based in
Fred., MD, is looking for a qualified individual with 3-5 yrs exp in A/V Const/Job
site Mgmt, who is willing and able to
work in high spaces, lift heavy equip,
and has a good driving record. FT
Position. E-mail resume to
MCG@audiodesignsolutions.com

CUST SERV REP

µ Full Time Environmental Services
(Housekeeping) Manager
µ Less than Part Time Clubhouse Dining
Host (20 hours per week)
Apply in person:

Skilled Nursing Facility in search
of Full-Time GNAs for 7-3 and 311 shifts and Part-Time/On-Call
positions on all shifts. Apply in
person and take the preemployment exam at 1235
Potomac Valley Road, Rockville,
MD 20850 EOE.

EDITOR

Write/design flyers and charts for
small company. Must be proficient
on Mac, Excel and Publisher. 20hrs
per week. Hours flexible.
Send resume to
marilynm0808@yahoo.com

Advertising Sales Representative
Comprint Military Publications publishes 8 newspapers each week and the
only website dedicated to the military in the DC region is looking for energetic, organized, computer savvy sales representatives to sell advertising into
military newspapers and online. Job requires previous in-field and telephone sales experience; prefer military veteran or military spouse with BA
degrees. Must be customer service oriented and consultative seller. Candidates must be able to create ads for customers and work well under weekly
deadlines and pressures of meeting sales goals. Prefer candidates with experience. Sales territory located in Northern VA, headquarters in Gaithersburg,
MD;
telecommuting
allowed
3
days
per
week
(Mondays/Wednesdays/Fridays).

Real Estate

Brooke Grove Retirement Village is an Equal Opportunity Employer

Small family owned/operated
construction company that
specializes in water/sewer, storm &
CIPP Lining. Immediate positions
available in Poolesville, MD. Must
be experienced, have valid drivers
license and speak fluent English.
CDL license a plus.
Call: 301-725-9075 or e-mail
humphreyandson@comcast.net.

Let Gazette Careers
help you find that
next position in your
LOCAL area.

If interested and qualified, please send resume and cover letter with salary
requirements to jrives@dcmilitary.com

Please Call 301-924-2811, option 3

For an established, fast paced
Allstate agency in Damascus.
Must have insurance experience
& computer skills. Opening
salary based upon experience
with higher starting salary with a
minimum of 2 years prior
Allstate. Benefits include
health/401k. Email resume to
aschwab@allstate.com.

Great job for students, retirees and
stay at home moms. Work from
home! Answer and handle phone calls
from 5pm to 9am two evenings twice
a month for staffing agency or one
weekend a month. Must have Internet access, and a car. Fax resume to
301.588.9065 or email to
cc2439@yahoo.com

Award winning transportation company in R’ville is
seeking an enegergetic individual to fullfill a F/T
position in our Reservations Department. If you
enjoy multitasking in a fast pace environment and
have a passion for providing excellent customer
service then please join us at our open house on
Tuesday July 30th anytime between 9-1pm
at 11565 Old Georgetown Rd. North
Bethesda, MD 20852.

Security Guard
µ Speak and read English,
clearly and fluently.
µ Providing building and
premises security to the
client’s property.
For detailed job description
and to apply go to
www.gazette.net/careers

Healthcare

Silver Spring

Work with the BEST!

Be trained individually by one of the area’s top offices & one of the area’s best
salesman with over 34 years. New & experienced salespeople welcomed.

Must R.S.V.P.

Call Bill Hennessy

GC3021

Career
Training
Classes Start
August 5th

class@gazette.net

301-388-2626
301-388-2626

bill.hennessy@longfoster.com • Long & Foster Real Estate, Inc.
EOE

Sales

Business Development Specialist
Media Sales
We’re looking for a Specialist who has a documented history of driving new
business. Post Newsweek Media provides local news and information to
communities in Maryland and Virginia. We are looking for a skilled sales
professional to assist small businesses in marketing their products and
services.
This is a inside/outside sales position. You would develop an
understanding of print, online, mobile advertising with a focus on
recruitment, retail and service business segments. Previous sales
experience needed, enthusiasm, great work ethic and a strong desire to
succeed.

Provide non-medical care and companionship for
seniors in their homes. Personal care, light
housework, transportation, meal preparation.
Must be 21+. Must have car and one year
professional, volunteer, or personal experience
www.homeinsteads.com/197
Home Instead Senior Care
To us it’s personal 301/588-9023
Call between 10am-4pm Mon-Fri